The two decade (plus) career of multi-platinum Def Jam Recordings artist Nas is at the heart of a joint announcement by the Hip-Hop Archive and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, to establish the Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellowship. The Fellowship will provide selected scholars and artists with an opportunity to show that “education is real power,” as it builds upon the achievements of those who demonstrate exceptional capacity for productive scholarship and exceptional creative ability in the arts, in connection with hip-hop. The mission of the Hip-Hop Archive is threefold: to seek projects from scholars and artists that build on the rich and complex hip-hop tradition; to respect that tradition through historically grounded and contextualized critical insights; and most importantly, to represent one’s creative and/or intellectually rigorous contribution to hip-hop and the discourse through personal and academic projects. Personal projects of fellows may include manuscript projects, performance pieces, album work, curriculum planning, primary archival research, and exhibition preparation, among others.
