R. Scott Heath

Visiting Assistant Professor

R. Scott Heath
R. Scott Heath

Dr. Scott Heath specializes in African American literature, black popular culture, and speculative race theory. He is the author of Head Theory: How Hip Hop Works, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His work appears in PMLA, African American Review, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters, and The New York Times.

Dr. Heath guest edited Callaloo’s acclaimed special issue on hip_hop music and culture. He 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 interrogates the ways in which shifting representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality inform contemporary constructions of blackness and Americanness.

 

Degrees

Ph.D. and M.A., University of Michigan; B.A., University of North Carolina

Classes Taught

  • The Black 90s: Archiving the Love Jones Generation
  • Octavia Butler Now! Reading Race, Gender, and Critical Futures
  • Kanye Versus Everybody: Black Poetry and Poetics from Hughes to Hip_Hop
  • James Baldwin Unplugged

Areas of Expertise

African American literature, black popular culture, speculative race theory