Dr. Ebony A. Utley is an is an expert in hip hop and love. She is co-editor of Hip Hop’s Languages of Love, and her other essays have been accepted by Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Western Journal of Black Studies, and Rhetoric and Public Affairs. Utley has lectured at universities across the country including: The Claremont Colleges, University of Arkansas, Wake Forest University, University of North Carolina, Antioch College, Los Angeles Southwest College, and Cerritos College.
She has presented papers at the major conferences in her discipline including those sponsored by the International Communication Association, the National Communication Association, the Western States Communication Association, and the Rhetoric Society of America.
Whether researching hip hop or love relationships, Utley focuses on how individuals express themselves and establish relationships despite histories of oppression, patriarchy, and invalidating media representations.
As an assistant professor of communication studies at California State University Long Beach, Utley incorporates her interests in race and identity into courses on hip hop, popular culture, gender, and rhetorical criticism.
As an undergraduate, Utley’s research interests were initially nurtured by the Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington where she was also a Herman B. Wells Scholar. After studying creative writing at Hertford College at Oxford University in England, Utley was graduated with highest distinction from IU with a B.A. in speech communication, a certificate in journalism, and minors in Spanish and English. She immediately entered graduate school as a Jacob K. Javits fellow at Northwestern University. She received both her M.A. and Ph.D. in communication studies from Northwestern. During her dissertation year, she was a Washington State University Summer Doctoral Fellow and an Arnold L. Mitchem Fellow at Marquette University in the department of social and cultural sciences.
