Nicholas (Nick) Vila Byers is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, specializing in the politics of 21st-century Black electronic music in the US and UK. His dissertation argues that genres like US trap and UK jungle—often dismissed as superficial or even pathological—are in fact more politically disruptive than canonical forms of protest music. By analyzing these 'low-brow' genres, he aims to challenge ruling frameworks of representation and resistance within black aesthetic theory.
Nick’s scholarship bridges academic and popular audiences. He has published on trap music in the scholarly anthology TRAP: Rap, Drogue, Argent Survie and written articles on contemporary protest music and the criminalization of rap music in magazines like Scalawag and Soap Ear. He is also an experienced instructor, having designed and taught writing-intensive courses on Black music, Black studies, and American literature.
