J. Griffith Rollefson recently completed his Ph.D. in Musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a recent Research Fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin where he conducted fieldwork for a dissertation examining minority protest strategies in European hip hop entitled “Musical (African) Americanization in the New Europe.”  He has served as a Lecturer in American music at the University of California, Riverside and has published and presented extensively on music, race, and politics.  He holds degrees from Bowling Green State University in Music History (M.M.) and Music Composition (M.M.) and Macalester College in Music (B.A.).

Rollefson’s publication record includes his initial investigation into European hip hop entitled, “‘Is This Really Liberty, Equality, Fraternity?’: The NTM Affair, French Cultural Politics, and Americanization as Cultural Miscegenation,” which appeared in Music Research Forum in 2004.  His growing interest in postcolonial musical perspectives resulted in a 2007 study of the Brazilian experimental composer/performer Tom Zé, published in Popular Music and Society as, “Tom Zé’s Fabrication Defect and the ‘Esthetics of Plagiarism’: A Postmodern/Postcolonial ‘Cannibalist Manifesto.’”  Most recently, an article on the history and theory of African American musical futurism, from experimental jazz through progressive hip hop, appeared in Black Music Research Journal as “The ‘Robot Voodoo Power’ Thesis: Afrofuturism and Anti-Anti-Essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith,” in 2008.  Finally, he has contributed a number of entries on African American and popular music topics to the forthcoming volumes Encyclopedia of African American Music (ed. Emmett Price, Tammy Kernodle, and Horace Maxile) and Musicians and Composers of the 20th Century (ed. Alfred W. Cramer), including entries on Afrofuturism, African American Experimental Music, Eric Dolphy, Tom Waits, and Stevie Wonder.

Rollefson’s paper from the international conference “Crosscurrents: European and American Music in Interaction 1900-2000,” jointly sponsored by Harvard University and Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München, will appear in a collection of the same name published by Paul Sacher Stiftung in 2010.  The piece drawn from Rollefson’s dissertation is entitled “Musical (African) Americanization: The Case of Aggro Berlin.”

Dr. Rollefson teaches Music History I (Medieval and Renaissance Music History) and Musical Cultures of Africa and the Middle East in the fall of 2009 and American Popular Music and Global Resonances and Musical Cultures of Asia in the spring of 2010.