Please note that this website is an incomplete snapshot of Professor Rollefson's work.  Please visit the About the Author section of https://europeanhiphop.org/ for a full up-to-date c.v.

J. Griffith Rollefson is professor and Head of the Department of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland.  Rollefson is author of the award-winning Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and recipient of the €2m ERC Consolidator Grant.  He received the PhD in musicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also served as UC Chancellor's Public Scholar.

From 2019-2024 Rollefson was principle investigator of the community-engaged ERC research project, CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation (www.ucc.ie/cipher and https://globalcipher.org/), which mapped hip hop knowledge flows on six continents (more info @GlobalCipher and https://europeanhiphop.org/).  He is also founding co-editor (with University of Cape Town's Adam Haupt) of the journal Global Hip Hop Studies (https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies).  He tweets @cybergriff.

Of his first book, Flip The Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality, Paul Gilroy, writes: "detailed, innovative, and exhilarating... At last we have a critical survey that can match the complexity and power of the music"; musicologist Ellie Hisama adds: "A brilliantly textured portrait of European hip hop...  An inspiring and hopeful book"; ethnomusicologist Tom Solomon writes: "Flip the Script is highly original and ambitious, and a substantial contribution to research on hip hop and postcolonialism"; and hip hop studies pioneer Murray Forman concludes: "Simply stated, this is a powerful book with a killer flow."

His new book, Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age, about Jay-Z and Kanye West's "death dance for capitalism," Watch the Throne, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2021

Rollefson's community engaged research has been featured on the RTÉ national news and in the primetime television documentary, Change Makers.  His research has also been recognized by the European Commission, Enterprise Ireland, British Academy, Volkswagen Stiftung, DAAD, ACLS, NUI, and AMS, and is published in Black Music Research Journal, American Music, Twentieth-Century Music, Popular Music and Society, Journal of World Popular Music, in the edited volumes Hip Hop in Europe, Native Tongues: An African Hip Hop Reader, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies, the forthcoming Made in Ireland, and elsewhere.

His research areas include: Hip Hop Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Popular Music Studies, Cultural Studies, Decolonial Pedagogies, African American Music, American Music, Black Atlantic Studies, Jazz Studies, Media Studies, Critical Race Theory, European Studies, and New Music Studies.

Rollefson is currently the recipient of an ERC Proof of Concept grant to develop his 3rdAI Hip Hop Research Engine into an income generator for hip hop arts and education projects (2025-2026).  His third monograph, “The Big Pill”: Black Musical Metaphysics and Enlightenment Binaries, is in development with University of Chicago Press.

I am first and foremost a scholar of African American musics and also describe myself as "a musicologist who does fieldwork."  That is, my PhD is in musicology, but my work engages ethnomusicological methods and I trained with ethnomusicologists (including Ron Radano, my doctoral adviser).  My post at UCC represents the first permanent position in popular music studies in Ireland, so in that respect, I am very much a popular music scholar and draw heavily on cultural studies and media studies approaches.  In the end, though, I suppose I aspire to the unifying label "cultural musicologist" rather than a sub-disciplined, part musicologist/ethnomusicologist/popular music scholar.

I research and write about Hip Hop (especially in Europe), Afrofuturism in Music, Jazz (Charles Mingus in particular), and try to take a postcolonial (and insistently historical) approach in all of my necessarily interdisciplinary work.

My specific subjects areas are: African American Music, Popular Music Studies, American Music, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Black Atlantic Studies, Americanization/Globalization, Critical Race Theory, Media Studies, European Studies, Hip Hop Studies, Jazz Studies, New Music and Emergent Music Studies

While my research is focused on black music and postcoloniality, my disciplining in the musicologies, music composition, and jazz performance has allowed my teaching interests to run the gamut from music appreciation courses in popular and art musics for non-majors, to jazz history, theory, and pedagogy courses for music majors, to the ethnomusicology and musicology sequences for majors. As a faculty member at Cambridge, Berkeley, and University College Cork I have led large lecture classes, advised teaching assistants, led graduate seminars in my areas of specialization, and served as a MA and PhD supervisor on topics from the music of the Cypriot Diaspora, to Jazz in Film Noir, to Beyonce's Feminism, to Tyler the Creator's Web Savvy.

My pedagogical philosophy takes as its germinal idea the paradoxical concept of “student as expert.” By arming students with critical tools and theoretical apparatuses, in addition to historical and cultural data, I challenge students to act as authorities. To actualize this philosophy I take the unusual step of placing form on an equal footing with content at the undergraduate level. We read academic journal articles, engage in discussion and debate, and problematize readings from texts (and textbooks) in order to interrogate representations of musical meaning—bringing artists and scholars into class whenever possible. Indeed, in my experience, the outcomes of this approach suggest that students who are empowered to consider and represent their own views on musical topics will be motivated to do the hard work necessary to make such representations meaningful and original. This approach necessitates a humanistic focus on writing over testing, and as such is much more time intensive. In the end, however, as an educator I am more interested in a student’s ability to synthesize content and theory in a critical way than I am in a student’s capacity to memorize and reproduce data sets.

My greatest successes in teaching have come in the realm of facilitating original research at the undergraduate level. My undergraduate course “Planet Rap: Global Hip Hop and Postcolonial Perspectives” employs the idea of the “Planet Rap Cipher” an online discussion site modeled on a hip hop “cipher” wherein a feedback loop is established to challenge, critique, and ultimately empower all members of the circle. Similarly, the final project for this class resulted in a “digital research object” posted to an online “research gallery.” My tech-savvy students develop interactive websites, real-time video annotations, podcasts, web-documentary projects, performance-led digital outputs, and other creative research projects that analyze aspects of global hip hop. In keeping with the cipher concept, as their final assignment students critiqued their classmates’ work and engaged in dialogue on the gallery, accounting for a portion of the final project grade. I have found that the “research gallery” model focuses my students’ research and writing as they are challenged to communicate ideas clearly and respond to both their professor and their peers. The format also indicates that students are able to model their presentations on my multimedia lectures, a fact that has proven a common thread in positive student evaluation comments.

I am also dedicated to teaching-led research. Following from my idea of student as expert, I love engaging students in the research process as I work through new material—and I have come to rely on crowd-sourced close readings of music and culture from my students. This belief in engaging and empowering students to act as experts has led to my recent endeavors in publicly engaged scholarship. These public ethno/musicology projects have ranged from teaching global hip hop and “Musical (African) Americanization” to audiences at London’s Southbank Centre (as part of Alex Ross’s Rest is Noise Festival), to public lectures on Irish hip hop as part of UNESCO’s Learning Cities Initiative, to acting as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar at UC Berkeley—a signature example of my teaching approach and philosophy that I will discuss in the following section.

In conclusion, I am a committed and challenging, yet well-liked classroom teacher who models the research process and then asks students to act as experts in developing their own research interests and agendas.