Carolyn Cooper

Professor Carolyn Cooper is a Jamaican literary and cultural-studies scholar whose work reclaimed Jamaican popular culture, orality and "slackness" from dismissal as vulgar and reframed dancehall as a legitimate object of scholarship — work that has led her to be described as the "queen of dancehall and reggae studies." Born 20 November 1950 in Kingston and raised in a Seventh-day Adventist household, she attended St Hugh's High School and won the Jamaica Scholarship (Girls) in 1968. She holds a BA in English (1971) from The University of the West Indies, Mona, and an MA and PhD (1977) in English from the University of Toronto, where she studied on a Canadian International Development Agency fellowship.

After teaching at Atlantic Union College in Massachusetts (1975-1980), Cooper joined the Department of Literatures in English at UWI Mona in 1980, rising from Lecturer to Professor over 37 years there before retiring in 2017. She was Campus Coordinator of the Women's Studies Working Group (1982-1992), Head of the Department of Literatures in English (2000-2003), and Director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies (2005-2008). In 1994 she established the Reggae Studies Unit at UWI Mona and led it for more than a decade, and in 1997 she founded the annual Bob Marley Lecture.

Her first major book, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, argued that Jamaican popular forms long dismissed as crude — dancehall lyrics, proverbs, Anansi stories — carry serious cultural and political meaning. Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) extended this reading to the sound-clash arena and dancehall's global reach. She co-edited Bob Marley: The Man and His Music (2003) with Eleanor Wint, and edited the collection Global Reggae (2012).

Beyond the university, Cooper was a long-running weekly columnist for the Sunday Gleaner and co-hosted broadcast programmes including Man and Woman Story on the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, Question Time on CVM Television and Big People Sup'm on PBC Jamaica. In August 2013 she was made a Commander of the Order of Distinction for outstanding contribution to education.

Also known as Carolyn Joy Cooper.