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Tricia Rose  

Prominent Scholar and Social Critic

Tricia Rose was born and raised in New York City. She spent her childhood in Harlem and the Bronx. She graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American Studies. She has taught at NYU, UC Santa Cruz, and is currently Professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. In addition to her duties at Brown, Professor Rose sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Black Girls Rock, Inc. and will serve as the Lund-Gill Chair at Dominican University during the Spring 2014 semester.

Professor Rose is an internationally respected scholar of post civil rights era black U.S. culture, popular music, social issues, gender and sexuality. She is most well known for her groundbreaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America is considered foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what is now an entire field of study. Black Noise won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995 voted among the top 25 books of 1995 by the Village Voice and in 1999 was listed by Black Issues in Higher Education as one of its "Top Books of the Twentieth Century."

In 2003 Rose published a rare oral narrative history of black women's sexual life stories, called Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. In 2008, Professor Rose returned to hip hop with: The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters. In it, Rose argues that hip hop artists and the commercialization of black popular culture more generally has more power than ever to shape racial and gender images, perceptions and policies.

Tricia Rose lectures, engages in conversation and presents seminars and workshops to scholarly and general audiences on a wide range of issues relating to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice. Rose has been a CurrentTV contributor and has also been featured on MSNBC, CNN, NPR and other national and local media outlets. More of her work can be found in Time, Essence, The New York Times and The Village Voice to name a few.

Speech Topics


Theorizing Black Culture

Hip Hop Music and Culture

Black Popular Culture

African-American Life in the City

Black Feminist Thought and Practice

Political Visions and Community Formations

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Writing About Race in the Post Civil Rights Era

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