Scott Heath
- Visiting Assistant Professor
Dr. Scott Heath specializes in African American literature and Black public culture, including sound studies and screen 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.
Dr. Heath is the author of Head Theory: What Happens to Hip Hop, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. His writing appears in PMLA, African American Review, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters, and The New York Times. He guest edited Callaloo’s celebrated special issue on hip-hop music and culture. His next monograph is Automatic Black: Race, Love, and Tech.
Prof. Heath interrogates the ways in which shifting representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality inform contemporary constructions of Blackness and Americanness. Around these ideas he has designed a deep repertoire of project-driven lectures and seminars, including ‘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,’ and ‘James Baldwin Unplugged.’
Dr. Heath earned his PhD and MA in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and his BA in English and Afro-American Studies as a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. R. Scott Heath is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
Education & Training
- PhD English Language & Literature, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- MA English Language & Literature, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- BA English and Afro-American Studies, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill
Research Interests
African American literature; Black public culture, including sound studies and screen studies; speculative race theory, regarding technology and futurism; southern literature and culture;
performance poetry and digital poetics; the Black 90s; straight-ahead hip hop.