This year, the World of Bob Dylan will commemorate the 60 year anniversary of Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival. In conjunction with the Bob Dylan Center, we will welcome several scholars, authors and musicians to share their work with conference attendees.
We are pleased to announce that Adam Bradley will give a keynote address at this year’s conference. In a talk entitled “The Rap on Dylan,” Bradley will show how Dylan shares certain bedrock lyric practices with rap artists. Among these are an extravagance of rhyme, a choice of words attentive to the currents of popular culture and the qualities of everyday speech, and a vocal delivery that often prizes rhythm over melody. Bradley will explore Dylan’s numerous connections to hip-hop music and culture through the tributaries of Black musical expression to which he and hip hop both owe a debt.
Adam Bradley is bestselling author, a professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA, and founding director of the Laboratory for Race & Popular Culture (aka, the RAP Lab). Adam pioneered the study of rap lyrics as poetry and has worked with some of the leading artists in popular music. As a curator, he has collaborated with museums across the country and the globe to launch exhibitions of art and culture. Most recently, he co-curated “Hip Hop America: The Mixtape Exhibit” (2023-2025) at the GRAMMY Museum. As a writer at large for the New York Times’s T Magazine, Adam tells impactful stories in long-form essays. He is the author of six books, including Book of Rhymes, The Anthology of Rap, and the national bestseller One Day It’ll All Make Sense, a memoir he wrote with the rapper and actor Common. Adam lives in Los Angeles. You can learn more about his work on his website.
Register today to join us for this talk as well as dozens of other sessions featuring keynotes, artist conversations, roundtable discussions, musical performances, and much more. The conference will be held on the University of Tulsa’s campus, as well as various locations in the Downtown Tulsa Arts District.