Mark Anthony Neal

Mark Anthony Neal is the chair of African & African American Studies, Professor of African & African American Studies and English, and the founding director of the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE) at Duke University. At Duke, he offers courses on Black Masculinity, Popular Culture, and Digital Humanities, including signature courses on Michael Jackson & the Black Performance Tradition, and The History of Hip-Hop—which he co-teaches with Grammy Award Winning producer 9th Wonder (Patrick Douthit). He is the author of five books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013). The 10th Anniversary edition of Neal’s New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity was published in 2015. His co-edited book, That's the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, is now in its second edition. Neal's writings have appeared in The Washington Post, Emerge Magazine, Callaloo, SOULS, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of Popular Music and Society, and The Village Voice. Since 2010, Dr. Neal has been the host (and founder) of the video webcast Left of Black, which is produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.