Profile

Sarah Lappas is an ethnomusicologist, hip hop scholar, educator, and facilitator dedicated to fostering learning environments that leverage the apparently intractable conflicts and greatest divides in U.S. American culture as our best opportunities for learning, transformation, and growth. Her research focuses on the intersections of gender, race, power, and place in hip hop music and the linguistic and aesthetic flows between American hip hop and the African diaspora. She has conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Ghana, Trinidad and Tobago, and New Orleans. Her work has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies and Ethnomusicology Review.

Dr. Lappas currently teaches MUSC 118D (Hip Hop in Urban America) and her current research and public scholarship is focused on creating collaborative, healing-centered, trauma-informed hip hop educational opportunities for youth and officers in youth detention facilities. As a Chancellor's Public Scholar at UC Berkeley in 2015, Dr. Lappas directed  a community engaged scholarship program bringing UC Berkeley students together with the youth and staff at the RYSE Center in Richmond to study and perform hip-hop. This work was featured in a cover story in the East Bay Express. Dr. Lappas has also held fellowship positions at the American Cultures Center at UC Berkeley as an Artist-In-Residence (2015-2016) and as a Culture and Activism Fellow (2017-2018).

Dr. Lappas earned her PhD in ethnomusicology in 2013 at the University of California, Davis, where she designed and taught original courses in American and African American music history. She received the 2013 Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award. Her dissertation, “‘Hood, Prison, Body: Lil Wayne and the Spaces of Gangsta Signification” explores the ways in which one of America’s most popular hip hop artists conveys and transforms racial and gendered meaning through music, lyric, and image.