Donna P. Hope

Professor Donna P. Hope is a Jamaican cultural-studies scholar, author, researcher and public intellectual whose work has helped establish dancehall as a major field of academic inquiry. She is Professor of Culture, Gender and Society in the Institute of Caribbean Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Education, at The University of the West Indies, Mona, where she has been on faculty since October 2017 (Deputy Dean, Graduate Studies and Research, 2018-2019; Director/Department Head of the Institute of Caribbean Studies, 2012-2015; Principal's Research Fellow, 2012-2014 and 2016-2017). She holds a BA in Mass Communication (Hons.) and an MPhil in Government, both from UWI Mona, and a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University, Virginia (2006), which named her a Distinguished Alumna in Cultural Studies in 2017.

Her scholarship reads dancehall not simply as a genre but as a cultural space through which Jamaican society can be understood, through questions of identity, class, power, gender, sexuality, masculinity and politics. Her first major book, Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (UWI Press, 2006), examined dancehall, power, violence, sexuality and Jamaica's marginalised working-class communities; her working frame for the music's subject matter is what she has called the six Gs — gun, gyal, ghetto, gays, ganja, God — alongside competition and money. Man Vibes: Masculinities in the Jamaican Dancehall (Ian Randle, 2010) extended this into a study of Jamaican masculinity, badness and conspicuous consumption. She has since edited International Reggae: Current and Future Trends in Jamaican Popular Music (2013), Reggae from Yaad (Ian Randle, 2015) and ReggaeStories: Jamaican Musical Legends and Cultural Legacies (UWI Press, 2018), co-edited the bilingual Dancehall Queen: Erotic Subversion / Subversion Erotica (2023) with Carla Lamoyi, and published the autobiographical Chicken Back Gravy and Such Delights: Life Lessons from My Journey (2019). Her wider output has been described as more than 100 journal articles, chapters, reviews and newspaper pieces, alongside work as a media commentator, talk-show host and newspaper columnist.

In February 2018 Hope founded the Dancehall Archive and Research Initiative (DHA), a repository for dancehall history, photographs, bibliographic material and other records, built in response to the loss and inaccessibility of documentation of Jamaican music. She was President of the Caribbean Studies Association for 2025-2026, describing herself as outgoing president after the June 2026 conference, and sits on the Ministry of Culture, Gender, Entertainment and Sport's Entertainment Advisory Board (2024-present), the Jamaica Journal Publication Committee (2025-present) and the Reggae Gold Awards Selection Committee (2019-2026). In May 2026 she marked twenty years of Inna di Dancehall, telling the Jamaica Gleaner: "To have your first book still trending after being released 20 years ago is big for me," and describing the book's account of dancehall as a pressure valve for stressed communities.

Also known as Donna Hope-Marquis, Dr Donna Hope and Donna P. Hope.