Born and raised in Harlem and the Bronx in New York City, Rose graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology (1984) and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in American Studies (1993). She has taught at NYU, and UC Santa Cruz and has, since 2006 been a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown. Rose is an internationally respected scholar of post civil rights era black U.S. culture, popular music, social issues, gender and sexuality. She has been awarded for her teaching and has received several scholarly fellowships including ones from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. 

She is most well known for her groundbreaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America is considered a foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what is now an entire field of study. Black Noise won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995, was voted among the top 25 books of 1995 by the Village Voice and in 1999 was listed by Black Issues in Higher Education as one of its "Top Books of the Twentieth Century." In 2003 Rose published a rare oral narrative history of black women's sexual life stories, called Longing To Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. In 2008, Professor Rose returned to hip hop to challenge the field she helped found, with: The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop-And Why It Matters. 

Rose is currently working on a multimedia project called How Structural Racism Works. This project examines how deep racial inequality is reproduced today and the stories that obscure it. 

In addition to her teaching, scholarship, and her Directorship at CSREA, Rose speaks to scholarly as well as broad public audiences on issues related to African-American culture, U.S. social issues, gender, inequality and diversity.