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I am a musicologist specializing in US popular music and culture. I'm especially interested in hip hop and the ways it is sounded across regions, locating itself in specific places even as it expresses transnational and diasporic ideas.
I am Assistant Professor of Music at Rider University, where I teach in the school's Popular Music and Culture program. I helped design the degree, which launched in the fall of 2012, and am proud to be able to work in such a unique program.
I also serve on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch as the web editor for the organization's site. Since taking this position in June 2011, we've expanded the site's offering, regularly featuring the cutting edge work of popular music scholars from around the world. I also hold an at-large seat on the executive committee.
Forthcoming publications include an exploration of the Mozart myth as it is presented in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus and then parodied in an episode of the Simpsons (Journal of Popular Culture), an examination of the earliest iPod silhouette commercials and the notions of freedom they are meant to convey (Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies), and a long comparative review of Kanye and Jay-Z's Watch the Throne and the Roots' Undun (Journal for the Society of American Music).
My book-length project - AudioFiles - blends my interests in hip hop and technology by engaging contemporary popular music through the lens of posthuman theory and Afrofuturism.
You can contact me at justindburton [at] gmail [dot] com.
