William & Mary graduate student featured on 'With Good Reason'

Hip-hop collection On April 19, Special Collections will launch the William & Mary Hip-Hop Collection, the most comprehensive collection of its kind devoted to chronicling Virginia’s hip-hop past from the 1980s to the present through oral histories, recordings, publications and other ephemera created by Virginia-based artists, collectives and businesses. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Hip-hop collection The collection includes music, oral history interviews, and artifacts such as SMILES Crew's first boombox, a cassette tape of Mighty MCs recordings, a Blendz award, and promotional materials for performances. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Hip-hop collection Kevin Kosanovich, an American studies doctoral candidate, has been a driving force behind the collection. He has interviewed many significant figures from Virginia’s hip-hop community, both past and present, preserving their stories for future researchers. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

by staff | April 18, 2014

Graduate student Kevin Kosanovich was featured this week on the radio program With Good Reason which airs on public radio stations around the country.

During the interview, he traces hip-hop’s roots, focusing on how it is expressed in different regions of our country, from California to New York and, of course, in the Commonwealth.

Kosanovich used his experiences preparing a doctoral dissertation on the development of Bronx hip-hop to become a driving force behind W&M's hip-hop collection. American-invented hip-hop music is now an international phenomenon with rappers in countries like Japan and Senegal. Last year, William & Mary’s Special Collection Research Center launched a Hip-Hop Collection chronicling the genre’s growth in Virginia – very much at the encouragement of Kosanovich.

If you miss the broadcast live, it may be heard via podcast, here. You may also subscribe to the podcasts online.

Kosanovich is a doctoral candidate in American studies at the College. In preparing his dissertation, which examines the history of the Bronx River Houses, the Zulu Nation and the emergence of hip-hop in the Bronx, Kosanovich employed the resources of Cornell’s hip-hop collection. That researched sparked the desire to create a similar resource of Virginia’s rich hip-hop history.