Reiland Rabaka
· Professor • Director, Center for African and African American StudiesVerifiedUniversity of Colorado Boulder · Ethnic Studies
Active 2002–2026
About
Reiland Rabaka is a Professor of African, African American, and Caribbean Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is also the Founder and Director of the Center for African & African American Studies at the same university and a Research Fellow in the College of Human Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). His research interests encompass African and African American history, politics, and social movements, as well as Black feminist theory, Black sexuality studies, Black popular culture, and critical race and decolonial theories. Rabaka has published extensively, including 19 books and over 100 scholarly articles, book chapters, and essays, contributing significantly to fields such as African and African American critical theory, musicology, and social movements. His work has made notable contributions to understanding African and African American cultural and political expressions, including civil rights music, Black power music, and hip hop. Rabaka's scholarship also explores the evolution of critical theories related to Black radical traditions, Pan-Africanism, and decolonization. He has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, including funding from prominent institutions such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of African American History & Culture. His cultural criticism, social commentary, and political analysis have been featured across various media outlets, including NPR, PBS, BBC, CNN, and The New York Times. In addition to his academic pursuits, Rabaka is a poet and musician.
Research topics
- Philosophy
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Gender studies
- Epistemology
- Law
- History
Selected publications
“I've Always Seen Myself as a Healer, with My Songs, with My Singing”
2026-02-26
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingIntroduction to Funk Music and the Funk Movement
2024-08-29
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2024-08-29
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2024-08-29
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2024-08-29 · 1 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingRabaka explores funk as a distinct multiform of music, aesthetics, politics, social vision, and cultural rebellion that has been remixed and continues to influence contemporary Black popular music and Black popular culture, especially rap music and the Hip Hop Movement. The Funk Movement was a sub-movement within the larger Black Power Movement and its artistic arm, the Black Arts Movement. Moreover, the Funk Movement was also a sub-movement within the Black Women’s Liberation Movement between the late 1960s and late 1970s, where women’s funk, especially Chaka Khan and Betty Davis’s funk, was understood to be a form of “Black musical feminism” that was as integral to the movement as the Black political feminism of Angela Davis or the Combahee River Collective and the Black literary feminism of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker. This book also demonstrates that more than any other post-war Black popular music genre, the funk music of the 1960s and 1970s laid the foundation for the mercurial rise of rap music and the Hip Hop Movement in the 1980s and 1990s. This book is primarily aimed at scholars and students working in popular music studies, popular culture studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, critical race studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and sexuality studies.
W.E.B. Du Bois, <i>The Souls of Black Folk</i>, 1903
History of Humanities · 2024-09-01
article1st authorCorresponding2024-08-29
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2023-09-07
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2023-09-07
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Black Women's Liberation Movement
2023-09-07
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
Arturo J. Aldama
University of Colorado Boulder
- 1 shared
Daryl Joji Maeda
- 1 shared
Elisa Facio
- 1 shared
Ângelo Martins
University of Birmingham
Education
Ph.D.
Temple University
M.A.
Temple University
Other
University of the Arts
Other
Center for African American Studies (CAAS), College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), University of Houston
Awards & honors
- Eugene M. Kayden Book Award
- Cheikh Anta Diop Book Award
- National Council for Black Studies’ Distinguished Career Awa…
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Reiland Rabaka
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup