CSSD project director Farah Griffin was interviewed for NPR's The Record about Kendrick Lamar's unprecedented Pulitzer Prize win for "DAMN." and her experience on the judging committee.

According to The Record, Lamar's Pulitzer win may constitute the first time a high-minded institution has seen fit to place an insurgent and equally popular rap artist, in the prime of his career, within America's canon of heralded music composers.

Farah Griffin was one of five jurors who whittled down the Pulitzer Prize's music nominees from about 100 to three who received recognition. She discussed the importance of this award, both for hip-hop and the Pulitzer Prizes as an institution, as well as the feeling of optimism that follows the decision to embrace a larger swathe of American music.

Click here to read the interview.

Farah Griffin is a co-director for CSSD project Toward An Intellectual History of Black Women.
This research project was dedicated to recovering the history of black women as active intellectual subjects and to moving the study of black thought, culture, and leadership beyond the "Great Men" paradigm that characterizes most accounts of black intellectual activity, thus challenging the traditionally male dominated accounts of intellectual work.