Alfred L. Martin Jr. is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at University of Miami. His research is concerned with the interplay between media industry studies and audience/fandom studies as related to television and film studies, critical black studies, sexuality, and gender studies.
Martin is author of The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021), On the Black Hand Side: Black Fandom and Cultural Politics (New York University Press, 2025), editor of Rolling: Blackness and Mediated Comedy (Indiana University Press, 2024) and has published articles in scholarly journals including International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Popular Communication, and Television and New Media. Martin has also written essays for The Washington Post and Los Angeles Review of Books, and has been interviewed/cited in The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and NPR’s Marketplace, among others.
Martin has edited special issues for Journal of Film and Video on queer production studies and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on race and comedy. He has also contributed chapters to edited collections including Watching While Black Rebooted: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences (2023), Ryan Murphy’s America (2022), Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (2019), The Comedy Studies Reader (2018), and Beyond Blaxploitation (2016).
Martin is a Board Member for Console-ing Passions, an international feminist media studies collective and serves on the editorial boards of Communication, Culture, and Critique, Film Criticism, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, Transformative Works and Cultures, and the Fandom Primer book series for Bloomsbury Academic.
Martin is currently working on a co-authored monograph on the documentary Tongues Untied (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press), and Ease on Down the Road?: A Cultural History of The Wiz.
A former ballet dancer, Martin also actively teaches ballet and choreographs and stages ballets across the country.
For more information about Martin and his work, visit alfredmartin.com.