Religion and Hip Hop: A Conversation with Josef Sorett
Please visit this webpage to view the live stream.
Interviewed by Darnell L. Moore
Professor Josef Sorett and award winning author Darnell L. Moore (No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America) take us on a journey through the entangled histories of religion, race and hip hop that illuminates how religious ideas and practices have animated rap music’s evolution since 1970.
Do you have a question for Professor Sorett? If so, we want to hear from you. You can submit your question in advance with registration or live during the event.
About these events:
Columbia’s Summer Ideas Exchange is a series of timely and dynamic conversations featuring some of the University's most accomplished and celebrated faculty across a variety of disciplines. These intimate and thought-provoking discussions and interviews preview some of the courses and content available during Columbia’s Summer Sessions coming up in May and June 2020. For more information on Columbia's Summer Sessions, please visit summer.sps.columbia.edu.
Josef Sorett is an Associate Professor of Religion and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University, where he also directs the Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice. As an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and race in the Americas, Sorett employs primarily historical and literary approaches to the study of religion in black communities and cultures in the United States. His first book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016) illumines how religion has figured in debates about black art and culture across the 20th century. A second book, The Holy Holy Black: The Ironies of an American Secular, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Additionally, Josef is editing an anthology, The Sexual Politics of Black Churches, which will be published by Columbia University Press.
Darnell L. Moore is the author of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award winning memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black & Free in America, which was listed as a 2018 NYT Notable Book and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers' pick. Moore is also a writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University and a 2019 Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. His writings have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Playboy, VICE, The Guardian, The Nation, EBONY and other outlets. He is the Director of Inclusion Strategy for Content and Marketing at Netflix. And he is currently at work on his second book, which is tentatively titled, Unbecoming: Visions Beyond the Limits of Manhood.
For questions, please contact sps-events [[at]] columbia [[dot]] edu (sps-events[at]columbia[dot]edu).
