Beginning Fall 2025, Temple University will introduce a new course focused on rapper Kendrick Lamar to its curriculum.
Titled “Kendrick Lamar and the Morale of M.A.A.D City,” the new course will be taught by Timothy Welbeck, the director of the Centre for Anti-Racism and a professor in the Department of Africology and African American Studies, according to NBC10 in Philadelphia. After 14 years of teaching at Temple, Welbeck has long included hip-hop and Black cultural expression in his classrooms. Examples of these include classes on 2Pac, urban Black politics, and the relationship between hip-hop and Black identity.
Welbeck told NBC10 that despite Kendrick joining other celebrities like Pac, Beyoncé, and Jay-Z as Temple study subjects, the Compton rapper is particularly “ripe” for scholarly investigation due to his social and political significance.
“Kendrick Lamar is one of the defining voices of his generation, and in many ways, both his art and life is reflective of the Black experience in many telling ways,” Welbeck told NBC10. “Being able to discuss his art in the environment that helps lead him into being the man that he is in a lot of ways can tell you him as an individual, but can also talk about the journey’s towards self-actualization particularly as it is related to the Black experience.”
According to Welbeck, he had been preparing this course for about a year, but because Temple had “embraced the study of hip-hop in academic spaces,” he had been using Kendrick’s content in his other seminars for ten years.
In order to better understand the Black experience and analyse the continuous development of Black expression in America, he hopes the course will use hip-hop and Kendrick Lamar as lenses. Helping students understand hip-hop as a potent art form and cultural narrative is another goal of the course.
According to Welbeck, the course would give students “a look at various scholarships around the types of urban policies that shift the demographic of Compton and how it helped to shape Kendrick Lamar.” Along with studying three or four of his albums, students will examine how hip-hop has changed as a result of different kinds of individual expression.
It is anticipated that industry experts who have collaborated with Kendrick would be among the guest speakers. Although there are just a few spots available, enrolment is currently open for the Fall 2025 semester.
