Ian S Sinnett

Graduate Research Assistant

Popular music and hip-hop studies, popular culture, cultural memory, media and technology, affect theory, Marxist political economy, critical race and ethnicity studies

Ian is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies. Growing up in Massachusetts, he earned his BA in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2013. In 2013, he moved to Kansas to pursue an MA in English at Kansas State University. After completing his degree in 2015, he spent several years as an instructor in the English department at K-State before deciding to pursue his PhD in Cultural Studies at GMU.

His primary research focuses on the various sociopolitical dimensions of popular music with a specific emphasis on hip-hop, and the ways in which popular music interacts with social and collective memory. His dissertation, Hip Hop Sampling and the Politics of Memory," investigates the compositional mode of digital sampling in hip hop to analyze how sampling and the sample itself interacts with forms of cultural memory, to interrogate how/in what ways sampling communicates and re-creates meaning from the past to present, and what may be some implications of sampling for political activism and consciousness raising.

He has published work in the peer-reviewed journals Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music, Lateral, and the International Journal of Communication, and has a book chapter in the collection Entering the Multiverse: Perspectives on Alternate Universes and Parallel Worlds, edited by Paul Booth.

Selected Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

“Digital Sampling and Reparative Structures of Feeling in Hip Hop,” Journal of Music Production Research, under review (2025).

“‘Once Again Back is the Incredible’: Hip-Hop Sampling and Material Memory,” Riffs. Experimental Writing on Popular Music 6.2: 19-26 (2023).

Book Chapters:

“It’s a Trip, It’s Got a Funky Beat”: Exploring the Sonic Multiverse through Hip Hop Sampling,” in Entering the Multiverse: Perspectives on Alternate Universes and Parallel Worlds, edited by Paul Booth. New York and London: Routledge, 2025.

Grants and Fellowships

Summer Graduate Research Fellowship, GMU, Summer 2024

Graduate Research Fellowship, Center for Humanities Research at GMU, Fall 2023

Summer Graduate Research Fellowship, Center for Humanities Research at GMU, $8,000, Summer 2023

Courses Taught

CULT 320: Globalization and Culture

INTS: 336: Poverty, Wealth, and Inequality in the US

INTS 304: Social Movements and Community Activism [Online and in-person]

INTS 202: Public Speaking and Critical Thinking Skills

INTS 101: Narratives of Identity [Online and in-person]

Education

Kansas State University, English, MA

University of Massachusetts Amherst, English, BA