Aaron Harcus received his Ph.D in Music Theory from CUNY Graduate Center (2017). Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he taught at Hunter College, CUNY, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His research interests include questions of musical genre and the racialization of popular music in the United States, musical hermeneutics and phenomenology, the aesthetics and history of rap music. He has presented his research at national conferences of the Society for Music Theory, MTSMA, the Society for American Music, and the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music.