Dr Monique
Charles

Brainy

Dr. Charles has published chapters with Intellect, Routledge, and the British Library. She serves on the editorial boards of Global Hip Hop Studies, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (University of California Press), Cultural Sociology (British Sociological Association), and Manchester University Press’s Subcultures series.

Her advisory work on the British Library’s Beyond the Bassline (winner of the Association of Cultural Enterprises Best Book Award and Museums + Heritage Awards in 2025) and her contribution to V&A East’s The Music is Black: A British Story place her at the intersection of public heritage and cutting-edge scholarship. She also appears in the BBC Bitesize / BBC Teach series The Music is Black: Celebrating Black British Music, a national curriculum resource produced with V&A East. A member of Sacred Cyphers UK, she bridges spiritual practice, sound, and Black cultural knowledge, and she organised and keynoted the Bashy Conference at The Roundhouse, London (Being Poor is Expensive). Her original frameworks, Musicological Discourse Analysis and AmunRave Theory, offer new tools for analysing genre, sound, and social context together.

It is my culture. It is the bassline my grandparents' generation brought over to Britain and passed down to me as a third-generation Caribbean British child. The music (grime, garage, reggae, broken beat, Afrobeats etc.) is an inheritance. It is not just my research subject. It captures how Black Britain survived, innovated, and refused to be silenced. I study it because nobody was writing our sonic history with the rigour and love it deserved. It demands methodologies on its own terms. I approach the research in ways that let me think with my whole self rather than carve off the parts that do not fit a conventional academic mould. Black British music is my brainy, my brawny, and my beautiful. It requires the intellectual rigour of mapping cultural formation, the physical power of the rave and the sound clash, and the spiritual beauty of a diasporic people making meaning out of bass, space, and resistance.

It is my culture. It is the bassline my grandparents' generation brought over to Britain and passed down to me as a third-generation Caribbean British child. The music (grime, garage, reggae, broken beat, Afrobeats etc.) is an inheritance. It is not just my research subject. It captures how Black Britain survived, innovated, and refused to be silenced. I study it because nobody was writing our sonic history with the rigour and love it deserved. It demands methodologies on its own terms. I approach the research in ways that let me think with my whole self rather than carve off the parts that do not fit a conventional academic mould. Black British music is my brainy, my brawny, and my beautiful. It requires the intellectual rigour of mapping cultural formation, the physical power of the rave and the sound clash, and the spiritual beauty of a diasporic people making meaning out of bass, space, and resistance.