Hisham Aidi

Hisham Aidi is a Moroccan-American political scientist, author, filmmaker, and senior lecturer in international relations at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His research interests include cultural globalization and the political economy of race and social movements.

His book Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture on global hip hop was a 2015 winner of the American Book Award.

Biography
He was born in Tangier and grew up in its old city. His formative years also included time in Spain. As a teenager, he would frequent Tangier's Dar Gnawa, or the House of Gnawa, where he might see guests such as the saxophonist Archie Shepp or the jazz poet Ted Joans.

When he was 15, he earned a scholarship to study at a boarding school in New Mexico in the United States. He then attended Franklin & Marshall College outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, studying political theory and economics. He also worked in college radio, where he played raï music and recordings by Abdessadiq Cheqara and Samy Elmaghribi.

In 1993, he began his doctoral studies at Columbia University, where he studied under and interacted with scholars such as Manning Marable, Robin Kelley, Mahmoud Mamdani, Edward Said, and Lisa Anderson. While studying at Columbia, Aidi lived in Harlem and worked in journalism and political analysis. After completing his PhD in 2002, he worked at the United Nations. He then lectured at University of Maryland.