CU Ethno Alum Prof. Adriana Helbig Publishes "Hip Hop Ukraine"

Prof. Adriana Helbig

The Center for Ethnomusicology congratulates Adriana N. Helbig, Associate Professor of Music at The University of Pittsburgh, and a 2005 alumna of the Columbia Ethnomusicology PhD program, on the publication of her book Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (2014, Indiana University Press). 

Book Description: In Hip Hop Ukraine, Prof. Helbig enters a world of urban music and dance competitions, hip hop parties, and recording studio culture to explore unique sites of interracial encounters among African students, African immigrants, and local populations in eastern Ukraine. Adriana N. Helbig combines ethnographic research with music, media, and policy analysis to examine how localized forms of hip hop create social and political spaces where an interracial youth culture can speak to issues of human rights and racial equality. She maps the complex trajectories of musical influence—African, Soviet, American—to show how hip hop has become a site of social protest in post-socialist society and a vehicle for social change."

Biography: Prof. Adriana Helbig is Associate Professor of Music and an affiliated faculty member in Cultural Studies, Women's Studies, Global Studies, and the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She teaches courses on global hip-hop, world music, music, gender, and sexuality, music and technology, and cultural policy. She is also founder and director of the Carpathian Music Ensemble, a student performance group that specializes in the music of Eastern Europe, including Jewish klezmer and Gypsy music. Her research has been funded through grants and research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Councils for International Education, IREX, and Fulbright. She has held a research fellowship at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC and was an inaugural research fellow at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Her articles on Romani (Gypsy) music, postsocialist cultural policy, music and piracy, music, race, and migration, and global hip-hop have appeared in edited collections and journals such as The Yearbook for Traditional Music, Current Musicology, and Popular Music. She is the coauthor, with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vanja Mladineo, of The Culture and Customs of Ukraine (Greenwood Press, 2009). 

Prof. Helbig completed her Columbia PhD in Ethnomusicology in 2005, with a dissertation entitled "Play for Me, Old Gypsy”: Music as Political Resource in the Romani Rights Movement in Ukraine, advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa.

Prof. Helbig's Personal Website

Prof. Helbig's Faculty Page at the University of Pittsburgh.

Order Hip Hop Ukraine on Amazon.com

Other ordering options available through The University of Indiana Press.