Emery Petchauer

Biography

Emery Petchauer is a Professor in the Department of English. He also holds a faculty appointment in the Department of Teacher Education and coordinated the secondary English education program from 2016 to 2022. His research has focused on the aesthetic practices of urban arts, particularly hip-hop culture, and their connections to teaching, learning, and living. He is the author of Hip-Hop Culture in College Students’ Lives (Routledge, 2012), the first scholarly study of hip-hop culture on college campuses, and the co-editor of Schooling Hip-Hop: Expanding Hip-Hop Based Education Across the Curriculum (Teachers College Press, 2013). Over two decades of organizing and sustaining urban arts spaces across the United States inform this scholarly work.

Dr. Petchauer has also studied high-stakes teacher licensure exams and their relationship to the racial diversity of the teaching profession, a body of research that received the 2018 Innovation in Research on Equity and Social Justice in Teacher Education Award from Division K of the American Educational Research Association. The insights from this research are reflected most clearly in Navigating Teacher Licensure Exams: Success and Self-Discovery on the High-Stakes Path to the Classroom (Routledge, 2019). His co-edited book Teacher Education across Minority-Serving Institutions (Rutgers University Press, 2017) addresses the topic of teacher racial diversity from institutional perspectives, highlighting the ways Historically Black Colleges and Universities; Tribal Colleges and Universities; Hispanic Serving Institutions; and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions educate and prepare teachers of Color. 

Dr. Petchauer’s most recent work draws from sound studies and sound practice in both content and form, publishing in scholarly genres such as web texts and audio essays. Publishing in these genres has drawn from skills and sensibilities cultivated from 20+ years of turntablist/DJ artistry far outside of academe and his more recent, growing expertise and formal study of sound design and synthesis. 

Dr. Petchauer has received teaching awards at both the high school and college levels, including the Board of Trustees Distinguished Teaching Award at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the nation’s first Historically Black University. His courses and research projects regularly collaborate with teaching artists, classroom teachers, activists, and community organizers. These collaborations have resulted in the People’s Sound Studio, the Sound it Out exhibit, and other public sites of witness. His scholarship and community work have been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the Office of Research and Innovation at MSU, and partnerships with Ableton and Koala Sampler.

Information on his most current projects can be found here.