Ian S Sinnett

Ian S Sinnett

Ian S Sinnett

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Popular music and hip-hop studies, popular culture, cultural memory, media and technology, affect theory, social activism

Ian is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies. He grew up in Massachusetts and earned his BA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2013. Shortly afterwards (after living in North Carolina for a time) he moved to Kansas to pursue an MA in English at Kansas State University. After completing his degree in 2015, he spent several years as an instructor in the English department at K-State before deciding to pursue his PhD in Cultural Studies at GMU. 

His primary research focuses on the various political dimensions of popular music with a specific emphasis on hip-hop, and the ways in which popular music interacts with social and collective memory. He is currently interested in the political and aesthetic dimensions of the practice of sampling to investigate the ways in which hip-hop sampling acts as a form of cultural memory that communicates past forms of activism into the present.  

Courses Taught

CULT 320: Globalization and Culture

INTS 304: Social Movements and Community Activism

INTS 101: Narratives of Identity

Education

Kansas State University, English, MA

University of Massachusetts Amherst, English, BA