Kyra Gaunt

Education Gaunt attended the School of Music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from 1988-1997, where she earned a Ph.D. in Musicology with a specialization in ethnomusicology. Judith Becker chair her dissertation committee with Janet Hart, Steven Whiting, James Dapogny, and Robin D. G. Kelley as her committee members. She also studied classical voice with operatic tenor George Shirley. She also holds a master's and associate degree in voice from SUNY Binghamton and The American University, respectively. She held appointments at NYU, Baruch College and Hunter College in the CUNY system, and is currently a professor at University at Albany, SUNY, where she teaches classes on topics such as music, gender sexuality, and other topics in her research area. Her research focuses on the musical play of black girls at the "intersections of race, gender, and the body in the age of hip-hop" and the "critical study of the unintended consequences of race, gender, and technology from YouTube to Wikipedia." Gaunt has also edited Wikipedia since 2007 and hosts WikiEdu courses.

According to Gaunt, double-dutch was innovated by young African American girls in urban areas after World War II. In her book, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, Gaunt invites readers to "broaden their interpretation of black musical experience" to include race, gender and body, and the experience of double dutch can be a path to understanding hip hop culture through a black girl's perspective . Gaunt wrote that double-dutch was an essential part of black girl culture in the U.S.: "If double-dutch dies in neighborhoods, that's bad news for black culture".

Awards, honors, and projects In 2007 Kyra Gaunt published The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. Her book was awarded the distinguished Alan Merriam Book Prize presented by the Society for Ethnomusicology. It was also nominated as a PEN/Beyond the Margins Book Award finalist. It inspired a work by fellow TED Fellow Camille A. Brown, BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play, which was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production. Among other significant publications, her peer-reviewed articles appear in Musical Quarterly, Parcours anthropologiques, and the Journal for Popular Music Studies.

In 2009 Gaunt was honored as one of the inaugural TED Fellows. In 2018, Kyra appeared in a video for the TED Design series Small Thing, Big Idea, where she used her research to discuss how the jump rope got its rhythm.

Gaunt was featured in a short documentary ad for the Nokia Connecting People campaign that showed the impact of TED Fellows around the world. The mini-doc featured an project called One Laptop Per Child, designed to encourage access to learning in developing countries by providing an Internet-connected laptop to every school-age child. Dr. Gaunt's scholarship has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation and the Ms. Foundation for Women.

Publications

Gaunt has published many works during her career. Her publications include:

Books

The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (2006, NYU Press)

Chapters, volumes, and anthologies

"Dancin' in the Streets to a Black Girl's Beat: Music, Gender and the "Ins and Outs" of Double-Dutch", in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (1998, pages 272-292, NYU Press) "Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: The Musical Vernacular of Black Girls' Play", in That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004, pages 251-263, Routledge) "‘One Time 4 Your Mind’: Embedding Nas and Hip-Hop into a Gendered State of Mind", Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s “Illmatic,” (2010, pp. 151–78, 2010, Basic Civitas Books) ""Double Forces Has Got the Beat": Reclaiming Girls' Music in the Sport of Double-Dutch", in The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century (2011, pp. 279–299, University of Illinois Press) "Forward: Truly Professin' Hip-Hop and Black Girl 'Hood", in Wish to Live: A Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader (2012, pp ix-xv, Peter Lang) "YouTube, bad bitches and an MIC (mom-in-chief): On the digital seduction of Black girls in participatory hip-hop spaces", Remixing Change: Hip Hop & Obama, A Critical Reader (Oxford UP, 2015) "Truly Professin' Hip-hop--The Rewind (1996): Makin' Black Girls Embodied Musical Play the Teacher", in Black Feminism in Education (2015, pp 103–118, Peter Lang) "YouTube, Twerking, and You: Context Collapse and the Handheld Copresence of Black Girls and Miley Cyrus", in Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music (2016, pages 218-242, Routledge) "YouTube, Twerking, and You", in Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity (2016, Routledge)

Select journal articles

"The veneration of James Brown and George Clinton in hip-hop music: Is it live! Or is it re-memory", Popular Music: Style and Identity, pp. 117–122, 1995. "Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions", Yearbook for Traditional Music 30:189, January 1998. "Plenty of Good Women Dancers: African American Women Hoofers from Philadelphia", Ethnomusicology 44:2, University of Illinois Press, pp. 359–361, 2000. "Music and the Racial Imagination", Ethnomusicology 48:1, University of Illinois Press, pp. 127–131, 2004. "Girls’ Game-Songs and Hip-Hop: Music Between the Sexes", Parcours anthropologiques 8, CREA, pp. 97–128, 2012. "The Two O'Clock Vibe": Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness in and out of Its Everyday Context", Musical Quarterly 86:3, Macmillan, pp. 372–397, Autumn 2002. "Got Rhythm?: difficult encounters in theory and practice and other participatory discrepancies in music", City & Society 14:1, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 119–140, 2002. "Roundtable: VH1's (White) Rapper Show: Intrusions, Sightlines, and Authority", Journal of Popular Music Studies 20:1, Blackwell Publishing, pp 44–78, 2008. (with Cheryl L Keyes, Timothy R Mangin, Wayne Marshall, Joe Schloss) "Introduction: APES**T", Journal of Popular Music Studies 30:4, UoC Press Journals, 2018. (With Carol Vernallis, Jason King, Maeve Sterbenz, Gabriel Ellis, Gabrielle Lochard, Daniel Oore, Eric Lyon, Dale Chapman) "The Disclosure, Disconnect, and Digital Sexploitation of Tween Girls' Aspirational YouTube Videos", Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships 5:1, UoN Press, pp 91–132, 2018.