Dr Richard Bramwell
Richard is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Loughborough University and Senior Member at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.
Richard's research interests are focused around the areas of black British vernacular and popular cultures. He is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Global Rap, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. His research has been published in Critical Studies in Television, Popular Music, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. His book, UK Hip Hop, Grime and the City, is published by Routledge. Prior to joining Loughborough Richard was a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge.
World-leading teaching and
research and in popular music and culture
In 2012 Richard co-created and co-delivered the first undergraduate performance poetry course of its kind, Writing Poetry for Performance, in collaboration with Professor Benjamin Zephaniah. Dr Bramwell has taught courses on postcolonial literature, literary theory, the cultural industries, television and society, and popular culture.
Richard was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded research project Performing Hip Hop Englishness: The Performance of Alternative British Identities through Rap. Over the last 50 years music genres such as hip hop, grime and drill have become central to mainstream popular culture in the UK. The project examined the role that rap culture plays in a range of organisations, funded by local or national government, and how young people in those organisations use rap to perform their identities and represent their communities.
Richard has written for The Guardian newspaper and contributed to programmes for BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Radio 1Xtra.
Public lecture for the Hip Hop Museum exhibition at the National Museum of World Cultures, Amsterdam.
"Make no mistake. There is no other book remotely like this one. It initiates a new era in the study of black London's subterranean music scenes and the broader youth cultures that they continue to fuel. Bramwell has not only accomplished an invaluable work of cultural history but provided a welcome reorientation for all future work in this field."
Paul Gilroy
King's College London
Young people in London have contributed to the production of a distinctively British rap culture. This book moves beyond accounts of Hip-Hop’s marginality and shows, with an examination of the production, dissemination and use of rap in London, how this cultural form plays an important role in the everyday lives of young Londoners and the formation of identities. Through in-depth interviews with a range of leading and emerging rap artists, close analysis of rap music tracks, and over two years of ethnographic research of London’s UK Hip-Hop and Grime scenes, the author examines how black and white urban youths use rap to come together to explore their creative abilities. By combining these approaches to develop a critical participant observation, the book reveals how the collaborative work of these urban youths produced these politically significant subcultures, through which they resist unfair and illegitimate policing practices and attempt to develop their economic autonomy in a city marred by immense social and economic inequalities.
Improving Educational Outcomes
Dr Bramwell's Rap in School's project explored the use of rap music to improve attainment in secondary schools. Richard co-taught a mixed ability Year 10 group, using rap to explore poetry in a way that was accessible to a wide range of students. The project explored how to bridge between the cultural competences that young people informally learn through listening to rap and participating in rap culture and the formally taught skills used in poetry analysis.
In 2019 Richard delivered the keynote lecture at the Hackney Learning Trust, Young Black Men Conference on Promoting Inclusive Practices.