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) 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 Beyond Blaxploitation (2016), The Comedy Studies Reader (2018), and Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age (2019).
Martin is currently a Board Member At-Large for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and serves on the editorial boards of Communication, Culture, and Critique, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Film Criticism, Transformative Works and Cultures, and Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture.
Martin is currently working on a solo-authored book, On the Black Hand Side: Black Fandoms and Cultural Politics, about blackness and fandom studies (under contract with New York University Press), a co-authored monograph on the documentary Tongues Untied (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press), and Rolling: Blackness and Mediated Comedy (under contract with Indiana University Press), an edited collection on Blackness, comedy and media.
A former ballet dancer, Martin also actively teaches ballet and choreographs and stages ballets across the country.
For more information visit alfredmartin.com for more information about Martin and his work.