Scott Heath
University of Pittsburgh, Africana Studies, Faculty Member
- Harvard University, The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Department MemberLoyola University New Orleans, English, Faculty Memberadd
- Cultural Theory, Digital Humanities, African American Literature, Black Popular Culture, Popular Culture, Critical Race Theory, and 16 moreAfrican American Studies, Africana Studies, Hip-Hop Studies, Poetics, Music, Technology, Literature, American Literature, American Studies, Southern Literature, Southern Studies (U.S. South), African Literature, Afrofuturism, Space and Time (Philosophy), Hip Hop Culture, and Soundedit
- Dr. Scott Heath is a visiting professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught previously at Loyola University New Orleans, where he was a professor in the Department of English and the direc... moreDr. Scott Heath is a visiting professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught previously at Loyola University New Orleans, where he was a professor in the Department of English and the director of the Program in African & African American Studies. He was a 2020-2021 Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Scott Heath specializes in African American literature and black public culture, including sound studies and screen studies. He is the author of Head Theory: What Happens to Hip Hop, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His work appears in PMLA, African American Review, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, and The New York Times.
Heath guest edited Callaloo’s acclaimed special number on hip_hop music and culture. He is currently developing a second monograph, Automatic Black: Race, Love, and Tech, and 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.
Around these ideas Heath has designed a deep repertoire of graduate seminars and undergraduate courses, including ‘The Black 90s: Archiving the Love Jones Generation,’ ‘Octavia Butler Now! Reading Race, Gender, and Critical Futures,’ and ‘Kanye Versus Everybody: Black Poetry and Poetics from Hughes to Hip_Hop.’edit
Research Interests: American Literature, Southern Literature, Black Studies Or African American Studies, American Studies, Popular Culture, and 12 moreSouthern Studies (U.S. South), Critical Race Theory, African American Literature, Hip-Hop/Rap, African American Studies, Black Popular Culture, Hip-Hop Studies, Global South, Africana Studies, Afrofuturism, Speculative Fiction, and Hip Hop Culture
Research Interests: American Literature, Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, American Studies, Music, and 13 moreTechnology, Digital Humanities, Popular Music, Literature, Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, African American Literature, Poetics, Hip-Hop/Rap, African American Studies, Black Popular Culture, Hip-Hop Studies, and Hip Hop Culture
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, American Studies, Music, Technology, and 11 morePopular Music, Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, African American Literature, Poetics, Sound, Hip-Hop/Rap, African American Studies, Black Popular Culture, Hip-Hop Studies, and Hip Hop Culture
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, American Studies, Music, Technology, and 12 morePopular Music, Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, Nationalism, African American Literature, Poetics, Sound, Hip-Hop/Rap, African American Studies, Black Popular Culture, Hip-Hop Studies, and Hip Hop Culture
Link to The New York Times Opinion Pages: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/06/06/do-dramas-about-slavery-stifle-tales-of-black-lives-now/these-dramas-about-slavery-arent-fixing-the-injustices
Research Interests:
This entry into southern studies spins off a certain strain of black cultural criticism, especially as it concerns my engagement with black speculative text and what I call speculative race theory. The black speculative project—what... more
This entry into southern studies spins off a certain strain of black cultural criticism, especially as it concerns my engagement with black speculative text and what I call speculative race theory. The black speculative project—what Alondra Nelson and others roughly twenty years ago were terming afrofuturism, an idea that has since gained popularity as a branded aesthetic interest—is driven by literary, visual, musical, and various other intellectual work that evidences a dynamic intersection of race, space, time, and newer technologies. Also prominent in much of this text is a sequence of tropes common to post-Souls cultural production, particularly narratives of containment and flight coupled with representations of selected subjectivities as more provisional than guaranteed. Al Green's tune “Gotta Find a New World” comes to mind as a poignant escapist critique, and Syreeta Wright's “Black Maybe” serves as a haunting inventory of tense potentialities. In these instances th...