Professor and Director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, where he also served as Deputy Dean of Staffing (2018–2020). He holds a PhD in Film and Media from UCT and is rated a B2 scholar by South Africa’s National Research Foundation and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). Haupt was the first South African scholar to publish academic work on hip-hop, and his research since has linked hip-hop studies to intellectual property, subversive technologies, and the politics of race, gender, and globalisation. He is the author of two monographs published by HSRC Press under an open-access mandate: Static: Race and Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media and Film (2012) and Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion (2008). He is co-editor, with Quentin Williams (UWC), Emile Jansen (Heal the Hood), and H. Samy Alim (UCLA), of Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-apartheid South Africa (HSRC Press, 2019), for which he also co-produced the accompanying EP #IntheKeyofB with hip-hop artist Bradley Lodewyk (b-boy King Voue).
Haupt is Coordinating Editor of Global Hip Hop Studies with Prof. J. Griffith Rollefson (University College Cork), and serves on the advisory board of the Hip Hop Book Series at University of California Press and of CIPHER: Hip Hop Interpellation, funded by the European Research Council. He also sits on the editorial boards of Drietalige Woordeboek van Kaaps, Communication, Culture & Critique, and the Journal of World Popular Music, and on the steering committee of Die Societie virrie Advancement van Kaaps (SAK).