Webinar: The linguistic and cultural influence of hip-hop and rap: findings of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English project by OUP Academic Marketing

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The linguistic and cultural influence of hip-hop and rap: findings of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English project

About

Cultural manifestations such as hip-hop and rap tend to generate specific language, and these words and expressions are frequently adopted more widely, constituting significant cultural and linguistic influences.

Hip-hop and rap cultures are an important source of evidence for the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE) project, and many interesting examples have emerged so far.

Join us for a discussion covering:

• A brief overview of the ODAAE project
• The main sources of evidence for the project, and why hip-hop and rap are particularly important among those
• Some interesting examples that have emerged
• How this type of language is monitored, and how editors and researchers decide what should be included or not, and why
• The influence hip-hop and rap terms have on African American English

There will also be some Q&A time – bring your questions to the panellists or send them in advance to oed.uk@oup.com

The ODAAE project is a collaboration between Oxford University Press and Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. It is spearheaded by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Editor-in-Chief), Director of the Hutchins Center and Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard, and is funded in part by grants from the Mellon and Wagner Foundations.

The event will be recorded for those who can’t attend the live session or would like to watch it again at a later date.

When

Thursday, October 17, 2024 · 5:30 p.m. London (UTC +1:00)

Presenters

Jennifer K.N. Heinmiller (panel chair)

Executive Editor, Oxford Dictionary of African American English, Oxford University Press

Jennifer Heinmiller is Executive Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of African American English and co-author of the award-winning Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (UNC Press, 2021). She holds a Master’s degree in Linguistics and a graduate certificate in TESOL from the University of South Carolina and a Bachelor’s degree in Language and Literature Studies from Bowling Green State University. Previously, she worked in the technology sphere as a linguist, data annotation lead, and Japanese-English translator. Her research interests include language documentation of varieties of English and Japanese and second language acquisition.

Anansa Benbow

Lexicographer, Oxford Dictionary of African American English, Oxford University Press

Anansa Benbow is a Lexicographer for the Oxford Dictionary of African American English. She completed her B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Rochester and her M.A. in Applied Linguistics at Teachers College, Columbia University. For her M.A. project, Anansa discussed "aight so boom" as a pragmatic marker in African American English. Previously, Anansa has worked with multilingual youth in Providence, RI and New York, NY. This motivated her to give a TEDx Talk entitled, Grammar Skool, which discussed language discrimination towards Black children in the K-12 space. Most recently, Anansa was a dialect coach for a theater in Chicago, IL working on their production of Sister Act. Anansa is the host of The Black Language Podcast, which seeks to honor Black people of the past, present, and future - a goal she hopes to continue with the ODAAE.

Adam Bradley

ODAAE Advisory Board Member

Adam Bradley is bestselling author, a professor of English at UCLA, and founding director of the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture (aka, the RAP Lab). Dubbed “The Professor of Hip Hop,” Adam pioneered the study of rap lyrics as poetry and has worked with some of the leading artists in popular music. As a writer at large for the New York Times’s T Magazine, he tells impactful stories about culture and society. Adam is the author of six books, including Book of Rhymes, The Anthology of Rap, and the national bestseller One Day It’ll All Make Sense, a memoir he wrote with the rapper and actor Common.
Adam Bradley’s website

Matt Kohl

Editor of hip-hop dictionary The Right Rhymes, and Staff Data Engineer, Indeed

Matt Kohl is the creator, developer, and editor of The Right Rhymes, an interactive dictionary based on rap lyrics, for which he was awarded the Adam Kilgarriff Prize. Matt began his career in New York at the Oxford English Dictionary. He later transitioned into the field of language technology, leading the development of Oxford Languages' data platform and helping to launch their Dictionaries API program. Since then, he has worked in multiple other industries across software, data, and knowledge engineering, most recently at Indeed, where he is a Staff Data Engineer. He lives in South West London, where he moonlights as a hip-hop lexicographer.

Joseph Lathbury

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