Lupe Fiasco Named Professor At Johns Hopkins University
Lupe Fiasco Named Visiting Professor At Johns Hopkins University
Grammy-nominated rapper Lupe Fiasco is bringing his talents to Baltimore next year.
The rapper announced that he will be a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute on Instagram on Wednesday.
“The Peabody Institute is one of the oldest music conservatories in America,” the Chicago native wrote. “World renowned for its rigorous training and for producing some of the world’s greatest musicians, and I’m honored to contribute to this legacy doing what I love most, Rap.”
According to the institute’s website, the program will “combine the resources and strengths of Peabody’s industry-leading Music Engineering and Technology programs with the Conservatory’s long history of excellence in performance training.”
Led by award-winning producer and professor Wendel Patrick, the program follows the “one-on-one studio model of a traditional conservatory education,” meaning students will receive private lessons. Rap majors, the description notes, will work one-on-one with a “chart-topping emcee,” most likely referring to Fiasco.
Hip-hop has been a “galvanizing grassroots arts movement that grew from our cities, including here in Baltimore,” Peabody Institute Dean Fred Bronstein said in a statement.
“We’re enormously proud for Peabody to be at the forefront of introducing this kind of program to higher education,” he said. “It builds on a burgeoning interest happening at the intersection of music and technology, now a real strength for Peabody, and we’re excited to see hip-hop take root here.”
This isn’t Fiasco’s first gig in academia. He’s currently a Saybrook Fellow at Yale University and teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an MLK Visiting Professor, which he will continue to do while at Peabody to advance “Rap studies and practice into the upper echelons of higher education at large,” he wrote on Instagram.
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