Dr. Lisa Calvente of DePaul University

We conclude Teachers Appreciation Month with a professor who uses both Hip Hop music and theory as an invitation for her students to think of the world around them more critically. Nathan Ciulla sits down with Dr. Lisa Calvente to discuss how growing up during the birth of Hip Hop inspired her to become a professor and a performance artist. She double majored in philosophy and sociology at City University of New York, Brooklyn College (CUNY), where she took the theory and critical analytics and intersected with Hip Hop music to better analyze culture and society. She would use the tools gained at CUNY and spread them through the world of the New York Hip Hop scene and as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Capel Hill, where she received both her M.A. and PhD. After graduation, not only did she begin to teach at various universities, but continued using Hip Hop and philosophy understandings in the classroom, and in countless journal articles and essays. Dr. Calvente also published a book in 2016 called Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance, and has directed many plays around the topic of mass incarceration.

Listen to her podcast on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, or Stitcher