J. Griffith Rollefson is Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland and author of Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. Of the award-winning book, Paul Gilroy writes: “detailed, innovative, and exhilarating… At last we have a critical survey that can match the complexity and power of the music.” Rollefson is Principal Investigator of the EU-funded research initiative, CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, which will develop new digital/ethnographic methods to map hip hop knowledge flows on six continents over the next five years (2019-2024). Griff is also founding co-editor of the new journal Global Hip Hop Studies (with the University of Cape Town’s Adam Haupt). His second book, Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
Rollefson received the PhD in musicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the advisement of Ron Radano and Teju Olaniyan 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. His 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.
For more information on Griff’s work, please visit https://europeanhiphop.org/ and to get involved in CIPHER, check out www.ucc.ie/cipher and follow @GlobalCipher.
