About the Panelists
Dr. Regina N. Bradley is an award-winning writer and researcher of the Black American South. She is an alumna Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow (Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Spring 2016), Associate Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, a faculty editor for Southern Cultures journal, and author of the critically acclaimed book Chronicling Stankonia: the Rise of the Hip-Hop South.
Dr. Shanté Paradigm Smalls is a scholar, artist, and writer. They focus on Black popular culture in music, film, visual art, genre fiction, and other aesthetic forms. Their first book, Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City, which won the 2016 CLAGS Fellowship Award for best manuscript in LGBTQ Studies, the 2022-2023 New York City Book Award from the New York Society Library, awarded Special (Honorable) Mention for the 2023 IASPM International Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame’s Book Prize, was published by NYU Press in June 2022. Their writing has appeared in The Arrow, QED, The Black Scholar, GL/Q, Women & Performance, Criticism, Lateral, American Behavioral Scientist, Suspect Thoughts, Syndicate Literature, the Feminist Press’s Queer and Now anthology, and the Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music. Smalls is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at NYU. They have held positions at St. John’s University, University of New Mexico, and Davidson College.
Dr. Jessica N. Pabón-Colón is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY New Paltz. She is currently a Member at Large for the National Women’s Studies Association and the Secretary for the Puerto Rican Studies Association. Her first book, Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora (NYU Press, 2018) is the first academic study on women’s participation within Hip Hop graffiti art subculture. Her essays appear in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Performance Research, Theatre History Studies, and TDR: the journal of performance studies. She is currently working on a new interdisciplinary anthology project called Rican Feminisms, which will chart the terrain of Puerto Rican feminisms of the past, present, and future.
Dr. Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the African diaspora, Hip Hop, dance, and structures of power. She is currently an Associate Professor of Critical Dance Studies and the Department of Black Study at UC Riverside, and author of Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (Oxford University Press, 2023), exploring the unseen or invisibilized Africanist aesthetics embedded in the ritual dance circle (called the cypher). Dr. Johnson also co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies (2023), and is founder and artistic director of the "Show & Prove" Hip Hop Studies Conference Series.
Dr. Lauron Kehrer is an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology in the Irving S. Gilmore School of Music at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where they teach courses in popular music, global music cultures, and western art music. Their research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in American popular music, especially hip hop. They have published articles in American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Popular Music and Society, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Their first book, Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2022) examines the work of Black queer and trans artists in hip hop. They are currently co-editing a volume with Stephanie Jensen-Moulton called “Better Be Good to Me”: American Popular Songs as Domestic Violence Narratives (under contract with University of Michigan Press).
Dr. Elliott H. Powell is Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts, Associate Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies, and affiliate faculty in the Department of African-American and African Studies and the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), and at work on two projects, tentatively titled Prince, Porn, and Public Sex, which explores the politics of sex(uality) and music in Minneapolis during the 1980s, and Illegitimate Sounds, which explores the queer potentiality of recordings like demos that do not conform to commercial audio legibility.
