Mark Anthony Neal

Mark Anthony Neal is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African-American Studies and Professor of English. Neal is the author of six books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Public Culture, Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture, the Post-Soul Aesthetic and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive (March, 2022) and co-editor, with Murray Forman, of That’s The Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (now in its 2nd edition).

At Duke, Neal offers courses in Black Cultural Studies, including signature courses on “Michael Jackson, Prince and the Black Performance Tradition” and “The History of Hip-Hop,” co-taught with Grammy Award Winning Producer 9th Wonder. Neal also directs the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE) which produces original digital content, including the weekly video podcast Left of Black, (now in its 12th season), produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Humnaities Instuitute at Duke. Follow Neal on Twitter at @NewBlackMan and Instagram at @BookerBBBrown; His Digital Home is NewBlackMan (in Exile) (http://www.newblackmaninexile.net/).