Elliott H. Powell is Beverly and Richard Fink Professor in Liberal Arts and Associate Professor of American Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. His work sits at the intersections of race, sexuality, and popular music, and is published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Routledge History of American Sexuality, the Jazz Research Journal, the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies, and The Black Scholar (for which he co-edited their first queer and/or trans special issue). He is the author of Sounds from the Other Side: Afro-South Asian Collaborations in Black Popular Music (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), which brings together critical race, feminist, and queer theories to consider African American and South Asian collaborative music-making practices in Black popular music. And he’s currently at work on two new book projects. The first is entitled Prince, Porn, and Public Space, which examines the intertwined worlds of music and sex in Minneapolis during the 1980s. And the second project, tentatively titled Illegitimate Sounds: Queerness and the Politics of Inaudibility in Black Popular Music, considers the queer potentiality of illegibility in funk, soul, and rap music.

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