Dr Justin Williams
BA(Stanford), MMUS(Kings College London), PhD(Nott.)
Expertise
A hip-hop scholar and musicologist, my expertise is in popular music studies, jazz, singer-songwriters and hip-hop culture.
Current positions
Associate Professor in Music
Department of Music
Contact
Media contact
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Biography
JUSTIN A. WILLIAMS is a Senior Lecturer in 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).
Additionally, he has written on topics such as progressive metal, Hamilton:An American Musical, jazz fusion, and crowdfunding music online. As a musician in California, he led a jazz piano trio and played trumpet with the award-winning band Bucho!
Research interests
- Popular music studies (especially hip-hop)
- Musical borrowing
- Film music and other forms of audio-visual intermediality (e.g. YouTube)
- Jazz (history, arranging, analysis and composition)
- The singer-songwriter
- Intersections between progressive rock and jazz 'fusion' in the 1970s
- Digital patronage
- Music and geography
- Mobility and sound studies
- The analysis of record production
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
HipHopHumanities: Artist-Academic Collaboration and the UK City [Pilot Case Study]
Principal Investigator
Description
We will celebrate the work of J Dilla with academic talks and performances, and try to integrate the two as fully as possible. These will take place in Bristol, Manchester…Managing organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
01/02/2023 to 31/12/2023
Hip-Hop's Fifth Element: Knowledge, Pedagogy, And Artist-Scholar Collaboration
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
11/01/2021 to 10/01/2024
Regional Rap in Post-devolution Britain
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of MusicDates
01/09/2017 to 29/11/2019
Know Your Bristol On The Move
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of HumanitiesDates
01/10/2013 to 01/10/2015
Publications
Recent publications
23/12/2020Polystylism and Stylistic Adaptation in 1970s Jazz-Rock
Jazz Perspectives
Brithop:
Brithop:
Intertextuality and Lineage in The Game's "We Ain't" (2005) and Kendrick Lamar's "m.A.A.d City" (2012)
The Pop Palimpsest: Intertextuality in Recorded Popular Music
Forum “Who is British Music?” Placing Migrants in National Music History
Twentieth Century Music
“We Get the Job Done”
American Music
Teaching
I teach Units on African-American Music, Intertextuality, Hip-hop Music and Culture an have taught on performance, music theory, historical musicology, and research skills units as well.
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