R. Scott Heath specializes in African American literature and Black public culture, including sound studies and screen studies. He is the author of Head Theory: What Happens to Hip Hop, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. His writing appears in PMLA, African American Review, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters, and The New York Times. His next monograph is Automatic Black: Race, Love, and Tech.
Dr. Heath is a visiting professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He has taught previously at Loyola University New Orleans, where he was a professor in the Department of English and the director of the Program in African & African American Studies. He was a 2020-2021 Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.
Prof. Heath has designed a deep repertoire of lectures and seminars on Black life, Black art, and Black futurity. He is an executive producer of The Dragons: 65 Years of Living Black and Living Free, a documentary film about the East Bay Dragons motorcycle club, made by Richard Harris III with music by Brian Horton.
Dr. Heath earned his PhD in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. He earned his BA in English and Afro-American Studies as a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.