CV

Alfred L. Martin Jr. is a media and cultural studies scholar whose work is concerned with the complex interplay between media industry studies and audience/fandom studies as related to television and film studies, critical black studies, sexuality and gender studies.

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Martin's first book, The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021) argues that the black-cast sitcom is an explicit genre, and therefore its engagement with black gayness does not resemble any other contemporary genre. By examining audience reception, industrial production practices, and authorship, the project argues that representations of black gay characters are trapped into particular narrative tropes.

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Martin 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 is currently a Board Member At-Large for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and serves on the editorial boards of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture.

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Martin is currently writing a book about blackness and fandom studies and a co-authored monograph on the documentary Tongues Untied (under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press).