Matthew Oware

​Matthew Oware is Lester Martin Jones Professor of Sociology and the director of Africana Studies at DePauw University. He also served two terms as chair of the sociology and anthropology department at DePauw. Oware’s primary research focuses on the constructions of racialized and gendered identities in popular culture, Black masculinity in African-American expressive culture, and the Black family in American society. His book, I Got Something to Say: Race, Gender, and Social Consciousness in Rap Music (2018), uses systematic, analytic, and interdisciplinary approaches to examining the lyrics of millennial rap artists. He also has publications in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Journal of Black Studies, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and Journal of African American Studies, among others.