Dr. Roy Christopher

Roy Christopher, Ph.D. earned his Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently a Professor of Communication at the Savannah College of Art and Design. He is author of Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater Books, 2019). He recently contributed several entries to the St. James Encyclopedia of Hip-Hop Culture (St. James, 2018) and an essay to The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (Routledge, 2014). He was also assistant editor of Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky’s edited collection Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Culture and Music (MIT Press, 2008).
 
Roy authored Follow for Now, Volume 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes. Featuring conversations with thinkers like Carla Nappi, Rita Raley, Dominic Pettman, Ian Bogost, Mark Dery, Douglas Rushkoff, and Dave Allen, and musicians like Tyler, The Creator, Matthew Shipp, Sean Price, Rammellzee, and Sadat X, as well as writers like Ytasha L. Womack, Chris Kraus, Pat Cadigan, Bob Stephenson, Simon Critchley, Simon Reynolds, Malcolm Gladwell, and William Gibson, this book is another critical cross-section of the now.
 
After over ten years of making photo-copied zines (e.g., The Unexplained and Front Wheel Drive), he registered frontwheeldrive.com in 1997. A few false starts later, it evolved into an archive of interviews and reviews that explored the peaks of theory and technology and the depths of the cultural underground. Scott McCloud described the site as “nicely designed and packed with ideas (a rarity on both counts),” and Mark Dery called it “brutally cool”. With this site, he established himself as what Disinformation called, “One of the Internet’s leading interviewers of subculture and new-science icons.” Though frontwheeldrive.com ceased operations in late 2007, the best of its content is archived in his first book Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear). A follow-up to that anthology is under contract with Punctum Books.
 
Prior to graduate work, Christopher spent over twenty years working as a writer, editor, and designer both on- and off-line. He has written about technology, science, music, and culture for everything from glossy national magazines and regional weeklies to hometown newspapers and homegrown ‘zines, and he has written, edited, designed, and consulted for such diverse organizations as Microsoft, Nike, The MIT Press, WIRED, MSN Music, 21C Magazine, Steven Johnson’s How We Get to Next, ESPN, DIG BMX Magazine, X-Games, SLAP Skateboard Magazine, Vital Skate, Figure/Ground, h+ Magazine, Disinformation, Reality Sandwich, Splitsider, HiLoBrow, Gomma Magazine, Ride BMX Magazine, Skateboard.com, Xbox Games, and Zero Skateboards. He has also guest lectured at several universities, as well as spoken at events like SXSW, SF MusicTech Summit, DMA 2011, and Geekend in Savannah. He also does illustrations for the Hong Kong Review of Books and designed their current logo.
 
Here’s an interview that Gino Sorcinelli did in 2015 about how Christopher came to be on his current path, and here is a list of books that has influenced his thinking and teaching.
 
View his Amazon page and his GoodReads page. Read his LinkedIn profile. Follow his Twitter feed.