Murray Forman is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He is the author of The 'Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and the forthcoming One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Popular Music on Early Television (Duke University Press, 2012). He is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005), all published by Routledge. Neal hosts the weekly webcast, "Left of Black" in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio, Neal maintains a blog at NewBlackMan (http://newblackman.blogspot.com). You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.