About the Course — Hip Hop at 50: Music, Politics, Religion
Taught by Columbia College Dean Josef Sorett, Professor of Religion and African American & African Diaspora Studies, this undergraduate lecture course introduces students to the study of religion through an engagement with the history of Hip Hop music. More specifically, this course is organized chronologically to narrate a history of religion in the United States (circa 1970 to the present day) by mapping the ways that a variety of religious ideas and practices have animated rap music’s evolution and expansion during this time period.
Lupe Fiasco
Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album, Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums; his latest being Drill Music in Zion released in june 2022. His efforts to propagate conscious material garnered recognition as a Henry Crown Fellow and he is a recipient of the MLK Visiting Professorship program at MIT for the 2022/2023 academic year.
Dr. Joshua Bennett
Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016)—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. He is also the author of Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), Owed (Penguin, 2020), The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022) and Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023). He has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT.
