JUSTIN A. WILLIAMS is a Professor of Music at the University of Bristol (UK), the author of Rhymin and Stealin: Musical Borrowing in Hip-Hop (2013), and Brithop: The Politics of UK Rap in the New Century (2020). He is also editor of The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge, 2015) and co-editor (with Katherine Williams) of The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-Songwriter (2016) and The Singer-Songwriter Handbook (2017). His latest book is a album-based study of The Streets's Original Pirate Material for the Cambridge Elements Series on 21st Century Music Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2024). His next book on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life for the Oxford University Press Keynotes series. 

In recent years, he has written on topics as diverse as progressive metal, Hamilton: An American Musical, jazz fusion, intertextuality in Tanzanian hip-hop, and crowdfunding music online. As a musician in California, he led a jazz piano trio and played trumpet with the award-winning band Bucho!