Associate Professor, Department Chair of Cinematic Arts
Alfred L. Martin Jr. is an Associate Professor of media studies and Chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. Martin’s research engages with blackness, queerness and the cultural production and consumption of media. Bringing together seemingly disparate bodies of research, Martin’s work engages with media industry/production studies, audience reception/fandom studies, archival studies and attempts to make new contributions across a number of areas within media and cultural studies including television studies, black media studies and queer media studies.
Martin is author of The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021) and Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (New York University Press, 2025), editor of Rolling: Blackness and Mediated Comedy (Indiana University Press, 2024), and co-editor of The Golden Girls Reader: Essays from the Lanai (Rutgers University Press, 2025). In addition to his books, Martin has published essays in scholarly journals including Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Media Communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Popular Communication, and Television and New Media. In addition, Martin edited special issues of Journal of Film and Video on “Queer Production Studies” and Transformative Works and Cultures on Black fan practices. Martin has contributed chapters to edited collections including Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences (2023), The Ryan Murphy’s Queer America (2022), Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (2019), The Comedy Studies Reader (2018), and Beyond Blaxploitation (2016). Martin also occasionally writes essays for Los Angeles Review of Books and has been a guest on National Public Radio’s Marketplace, CUNY-TV’s Independent Sources and Iowa Public Radio’s Talk of Iowa.
A firm believer in service to the industry, Martin has served the Society for Cinema Media Studies as a Board Member and as Senior Co-Chair of its Television Studies Scholarly Interest Group and Graduate Student Representative for its Black Caucus. Martin also was previously secretary for the Popular Culture and Ethnicity and Race in Communication divisions of the International Communication Association. He also serves on the editorial boards of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Film Quarterly, and Communication, Culture, and Critique.
Martin earned his PhD in media studies from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas – Austin after earning an MA in Sociology from DePaul University and a BA in Journalism from Arizona State University. Prior to his academic career, Martin danced professionally for Ballet West (Salt Lake City, UT) and trained with the Joffrey Ballet (NY), Pennsylvania Ballet and is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy. After his ballet career, Martin worked in public relations and marketing for consumer brands including Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, Lava® Brand Motion Lamps, S. C. Johnson, Georgia Pacific, The Alzheimer’s Association, and Wendy’s. From 2006 – 2016, Martin was President of What Works PR, a marketing communications consultancy serving book authors and financial services professionals.