FROM TRICIAROSE.COM

Tricia Rose graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in the field of American Studies. She has taught at NYU, University of California at Santa Cruz and is now a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.

Professor Rose is most well-known for her ground-breaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, published in 1994, has since become a classic. It is considered a foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what has eventually become a serious field of study. In 1999, Black Issues in Higher Education listed Black Noise one of its “Top Books of the Twentieth Century.” In 2003, Professor Rose published another path-breaking book. Her oral history of black women’s sexual life stories, Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy, puts everyday black women’s sexual lives at the center of a conversation about women and sexuality which has generally marginalized these women’s own stories.

Her new book is entitled: The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why it Matters. In The Hip Hop Wars, Rose explores ten of the most crucial issues at stake in the public conversation on hip hop, examining the rhetoric on each side of the debate. Rose concludes with a call to reincarnate the progressive and creative heart of what hip hop once was, and can still be.  What she calls for is not a sanitized vision—a world stripped of sexual trouble or gangstas—but one that more accurately reflects a much richer space of culture, politics, anger, and yeah, sex, than the current ubiquitous images in sound and video now provide. 

Professor Rose lectures frequently to scholarly and general audiences on a wide range of topics relating to American cultural politics, black culture and music and gender. Rose has also been featured as an expert commentator on NPR and other national and local radio outlets, and on television. More of her work can be found in articles appearing in magazines and newspapers such as Time, Essence, The New York Times and The Village Voice and on her website, www.triciarose.com.