We are pleased to introduce the 2020-2021 Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellows, Keith C. Harrison and Scott Health! Harrison and Health will serve as sources of hiphop knowledge to the Hiphop Archive, and contribute to the extensive research conducted by Research Assistants on various projects.
C. Keith Harrison is Professor of Business, Hip Hop, and Sport at the University of Central Florida as well as Associate Unit Head/Chief Academic Officer of the DeVos Sport Business Management Graduate Program in the College of Business and founding director (2006-2014) of The Minor That’s Major™ Sport Business Management Undergraduate Program. Harrison has published numerous peer-review articles, academic book chapters, and has co-edited two books with one on sport data analytics and another on education, Hip Hop culture and sport. He is Senior-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Higher Education Athletics & Innovation. He is the president and co-founder of scholarballer.org and researcher for the NFL’s good business diversity and inclusion series. Harrison has also consulted for over two decades with several universities, corporate brands, and professional sport organizations.
Scott Heath specializes in African American literature, black public culture, and speculative race theory. He is the author of Head Theory: How Hip Hop Works, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His writing appears in PMLA, African American Review, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters, and The New York Times. He guest edited Callaloo’s acclaimed special issue on hip-hop music and culture. Heath is at work on a second monograph, Automatic Black: Technologies of Race and Culture Design, and on an edited volume, Versus: Hyperlinking Black Writing and Sound. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English at Loyola University New Orleans.
As a Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow, Heath is writing Automatic Black, a sequence of meditations regarding the intersection of newer technologies and certain social turns. The project introduces speculative race theory, indicating that recent advances in sound culture and screen culture inform the specifications and practice of blackness. The book details a circuitry that facilitates access to previously protected cultural sites, exploding them into revised racial publics.
