Lauren Kelly

Lauren Leigh Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She is the founder of the Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism Conference, an annual intergenerational learning symposium co-designed and facilitated by high school and undergraduate youth. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, Lauren taught high school English for ten years in New York where she also developed courses in Hip Hop Literature and Culture, Spoken Word poetry, and Theatre Arts.
Kelly received her Ph.D. in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University; her MA in Adolescent Education from St. John’s University in Queens, NY; and her BA in English from Wesleyan University. Her research focuses on critical literacy, Hip Hop pedagogy, youth critical consciousness, and the cultivation of youth agency and activism towards the imagining and building of our collective social futures.
Kelly’s work has been nationally recognized, including receiving the 2023 Teachers College Columbia University Early Career Alumni Award; the 2023 Rutgers University Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence; the 2023 Harvard University Nasir Jones Fellowship; the 2022 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship; the 2021 Save the Kids Hip Hop Activism Scholar-Activist of the Year Award, and the 2020 American Educational Research Association Writing and Literacies Special Interest Group Early Career Award.
In addition to several academic journal publications, Kelly is the author of Teaching with Hip Hop in the 7-12 Grade Classroom: A Guide to Supporting Students’ Critical Development through Popular Texts, published by Routledge and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy, the first international edited volume on Hip Hop Education that covers research, teaching, and community scholarship in the field. It is also the first book of its kind to feature the voices of undergraduate youth, who are emerging education scholars and co-facilitators of our collective futures.