Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is one of the leading hip-hop generation intellectuals in the country. His work, which covers topics such as culture, politics, and education, has appeared in numerous journals, magazines, books, and anthologies. Dr. Hill has lectured widely and provides regular commentary for media outlets like NPR, Washington Post, Essence Magazine, and the New York Times. He is the host of the nationally syndicated television show Our World With Black Enterprise, which airs Sunday mornings on TV One and broadcast markets around the country.  He also provides regular commentary for CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News Channel, where he was a political contributor and regular guest on The O’Reilly Factor. An award-winning writer, Dr. Hill is a columnist and editor-at-large for the Philadelphia Daily News.

Since 2009, Dr. Hill has been on the faculty of Columbia University as Associate Professor of Education at Teachers College. He also holds an affiliated faculty appointment in African American Studies at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.

Since his days as a youth in Philadelphia, Dr. Hill has been a social justice activist and organizer. He is a founding board member of My5th, a non-profit organization devoted to educating youth about their legal rights and responsibilities. He is also a board member and organizer of the Philadelphia Student Union. Dr. Hill also works closely with the ACLU Drug Reform Project, focusing on drug informant policy. In addition to his political work, Dr. Hill continues to work directly with African American and Latino youth. In 2001, he started a literacy project that uses hip-hop culture to increase school engagement and reading skills among high school students. He also continues to organize and teach adult literacy courses for high school dropouts in Philadelphia and Camden.

In 2005, Ebony Magazine named him one of America’s top 30 Black leaders under 30 years old. In 2011, Ebony named him one of America’s 100 most influential Black leaders.

Dr. Hill is the author of two books: Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity and The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black life in America. He is also co-editor of three books: Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility; Schooling Hip-Hop: New Directions in Hip-Hop Based Education; and The Anthropology of Education Reader. He is currently completing two manuscripts: Knowledge of Self: Race, Masculinity, and the Politics of Reading; and First Class Jails/Second Class Schools: Education in the Age of Incarceration.

Trained as an anthropologist of education, Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the intersections between culture, politics, and education. He is particularly interested in locating various sites of possibility for political resistance, identity work, and knowledge production outside of formal schooling contexts. Particular sites of inquiry include prisons, Black bookstores, and youth cultural production