Tupac in Academia: Courses, Conferences, Archives

In the fall of 1997, a year after Tupac’s death, MTV posed a provocative question: Is there really room for a rapper in the canon of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats? The lecture halls answered faster than expected. Shakur was among the first hip-hop artists to be taught as a subject in their own right at universities. Today, lectures, conferences, books, and archives are devoted to his work. This page collects the documented cases; it claims only what can be read on university websites or in the contemporary press.

Berkeley Leads the Way: Tupac Becomes Regular Course Material (1997 to 2000)

The University of California, Berkeley kicked things off in the fall of 1997. According to an Associated Press report dated September 8, 1997, more than 100 interested students signed up for a seminar on Tupac’s poetry. It was led by the student Arvand Elihu, with the university’s approval. It offered course credit and was graded pass/fail only. Elihu called Tupac “the Bob Dylan of our day.” Sitting in the room was Leila Steinberg, by her own account Tupac’s first manager. The report is summarized on the page Tupac in the lecture hall, while MTV’s version is available at Majoring in Tupac.

In January 1998, MTV reported on a Tupac seminar at the University of Wyoming, and in June 2000 on the second Tupac conference in Oakland. In between, on November 1, 1999, came The Rose That Grew from Concrete, the volume of poems Tupac wrote as a teenager. It turned the rapper into an author for teachers as well (see The Rose That Grew from Concrete).

The Harvard conference on May 3, 1997, had a different character. Under the title “Life After Death: Rap, Reality, and Social Responsibility,” the gathering organized by the Black Students Association responded to the murders of Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G., announced with guests including Chuck D and Michael Eric Dyson. How it actually unfolded is not documented in the sources; see Harvard calls a conference.

Harvard and Penn Debate the Modern Folk Hero (2002 and 2003)

In the spring of 2002, Harvard piloted the course “Modern Protest Literature: From Thomas Paine to Tupac” (English 176a) with 106 students. Instructors Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer wanted to show how literature connects to social change, as the Daily Egyptian reported on July 17, 2002. Tupac was featured there alongside spirituals, folk songs, and speeches; the marketing of artists like him was also addressed.

On April 17, 2003, the symposium “All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for the Modern Folk Hero” followed at Harvard’s Barker Center. Organizers included the Hiphop Archive, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, and the Program in Folklore and Mythology. The keynote speaker was Michael Eric Dyson; further contributions came from Mark Anthony Neal, Murray Forman, Emmett Price, Cheryl Keyes, Greg Dimitriadis, and Knut Aukrust from Oslo. According to the report in the Harvard Gazette, Dyson argued that Tupac’s heroism did not depend on moral flawlessness, but on the fact that he bore witness to pain and spoke the truth. Neal described him as an “organic intellectual,” Price as a Black folk hero in the tradition of trickster figures.

Dyson had sparked the debate two years earlier with his book Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (2001) (see the book page). In the spring of 2003, he taught a course on Tupac at the University of Pennsylvania with around 200 students. On January 30, 2003, The Daily Pennsylvanian described the seminar as an examination of the music, philosophy, and contradictions of his life, as well as the way his memory has been used since his death.

Oslo Devotes an Entire University Course to Tupac (2012)

The University of Oslo went unusually far. Cultural studies scholar Knut Aukrust offered the course KULH1111, Tupac, hiphop og kulturhistorie there; reading materials for 2012 and 2014 are available on the university’s website. The description calls Tupac one of the best-known and most controversial faces of gangsta rap, an “icon with saint-like status” far beyond his fans.

The course connects Tupac’s names (Tupac Amaru, Makaveli) to questions of narrative culture, mentality, religion and rap, feminism, and the commercialization of resistance. Today it is marked as discontinued.

Prophetic Critique and Original Documents: Theology and Archives

Theology has taken an interest in Tupac as well. In 2019, Boston University offered the course “The Prophetic Witness of Tupac Shakur” for the third time, taught by Barbod Salimi of the School of Theology. Students read the lyrics as a critique of injustice, mass incarceration, and gender roles, alongside essays by Dyson (BU Today, February 27, 2019).

Archives are essential for research. The Hip Hop Collection at Cornell University holds, among other items, a three-page prison letter from Tupac dated August 17, 1995, with a poem and a photograph, 156 mostly unopened fan letters from around 1995, and copies of FBI files in the Phyllis Pollack collection.

More Than Headlines: How Scholarship Frames Tupac

The scholars mentioned read Tupac in very different ways: as a folk hero, as an “organic intellectual,” as a poet, as a prophetic voice, as a subject of cultural history. What they have in common is that they do not reduce him to the scandal-ridden rapper of the headlines.

Those wishing to follow the debate will find the most important titles under Books, while Tupac’s own writings are available under Poems. How other artists reference him is shown on the page Influence on other artists. In doing so, the lecture halls answered the question MTV posed in 1997 in their own way: in academic discourse, Shakur is studied not in spite of his contradictions, but precisely because of them.