J Griffith Rollefson

UCC

J. Griffith Rollefson is Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland and has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar.  Rollefson is founding co-editor (with University of Cape Town’s Adam Haupt) of the journal Global Hip Hop Studies and Principle Investigator of the ERC (CoG) research initiative CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, which is developing new community-engaged digital/ethnographic methods to map hip hop knowledge flows on six continents (2019-2024).  His first book, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2019 Ruth Stone Book Award and his new book, Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age, about Jay-Z and Kanye West’s death dance for capitalism was published by University of Michigan Press in 2021.  

Rollefson’s research has been recognized by the European Commission, ACLS, AMS, SEM, Volkswagen Stiftung, DAAD, Enterprise Ireland, and British Academy, and is published in Black Music Research Journal, American Music, Twentieth-Century Music, Popular Music and Society, Journal of World Popular Music and in the edited volumes Hip Hop in Europe (LIT Verlag), Native Tongues: An African Hip Hop Reader (Africa World Press), The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies (OUP), Interpretation (Paraguay Press), the forthcoming Made in Ireland (Routledge), and elsewhere.