Professor Adam Haupt

Director and Professor of Media Studies

Professor Adam Haupt is Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies. The National Research Foundation rates him a B2 scholar and he is a member of ASSAf (Academy of Science of South Africa). He is co-editor of Neva Again: Hip-Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-apartheid South Africa with Quentin Williams (UWC), Emile Jansen (Heal the Hood) and H. Samy Alim (UCLA). He co-produced an EP, #IntheKeyofB , for the book project with hip-hop artist Bradley Lodewyk (aka b-boy King Voue) and is the author of Static: Race and Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media and Film and Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. These books are published by HSRC Press, which has an open access mandate.


Prof. Haupt is Coordinating Editor of Global Hip Hop Studies with Prof. J. Griffith Rollefson (University College Cork). He serves on the advisory board for the first Hip Hop Book Series by University of California Press and on the advisory board of CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, which is funded by the European Research Council. He also serves on the editorial board of Drietalige Woordeboek van Kaaps (www.dwkaaps.co.za), Communication, Culture & Critique, Journal of World Popular Music and the steering committee of Die Societie virrie Advancement van Kaaps (SAK, https://sakaaps.co.za/). 
 

Publications:

  • Haupt, A. “Sample a Look Back: Autoethnographic Reflections on Hiphopography, Language, and Identity”. Untold Autoethnographic Stories of (In)justice, Teaching, and Scholarship: Textu(r)alities in and Beyond Applied Linguistics. Ari Sherris & Joy Kreeft Peyton (eds.). Multilingual Matters: Bristol, 2025.

  • Haupt, A. “Recalculating… Hiphopography and Decentring Hegemonic Scholarship”. Global Hiphopography. Quentin Williams & Jaspal Naveel Singh (eds.) Palgrave: London, 2023.
  • Alim, H. Samy, Quentin E. Williams, Adam Haupt & Emile Jansen. ‘“Kom Khoi San, kry trug jou land”: Disrupting White Settler Colonial Logics of Language, Race, and Land with Afrikaaps’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 31.2 (2021): 194-217.
  • Haupt, A. “Possessive Investments in Whiteness at a Post-Apartheid University”. The Intersections of Whiteness. Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt (eds.). Routledge: London & NY, 2019.
  • Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-apartheid South Africa edited by Adam Haupt (UCT), Quentin Williams (UWC), Emile Jansen (Heal the Hood) and H. Samy Alim (UCLA). HSRC Press, 2019.
  • Haupt, A. “Inhale Determination, We Will Overcome: Eavesdrop, Mr Devious and Brasse vannie Kaap’s Representational Politics”. Journal of World Popular Music 5.2 (2018).
  • Haupt, A. “’Non-Poor Only’: Culture Jamming and the Limits of Free Speech in South Africa”. Media and Citizenship Herman Wasserman and Anthea Garman (eds.). HSRC Press: Cape Town, 2017.
  • Haupt, A. “‘True to the Game’: Straight Outta Compton's Affirmation of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy.” Black Camera 8.2 (2017): 208–225.
  • Haupt, A. “Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?'s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop”. M/C Journal 20.1 (March 2017).

  • Alim, H. Samy & Adam Haupt. “Reviving Soul(s): Hip Hop as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy in the U.S. & South Africa”. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice (Django Paris and H. Samy Alim, eds.). Teachers College Press, Columbia University: New York, 2017.

Research interests:

  • Hip hop studies
  • Race, gender & class politics
  • Intersectional approaches to cultural studies
  • Language, representation and identity
  • Cultural appropriation
  • Film studies
  • Counterculture & youth culture/s
  • Intellectual property rights, culture & technology
  • Media, technology & democracy
  • Political economy of the media / social media