My academic interests center on the history and theory of African American cultural production and media representation. Broadly, my research and teaching engages with questions concerning race as they relate to topics in television, film, and digital media studies, black studies, gender and sexuality studies, performance studies, as well as U.S. public and popular culture.
My first book manuscript explores race and fame through questions concerning publicity and notoriety. I analyze famous individuals, popular performances, and memorable moments in late twentieth and early twenty-first century U.S. television and digital media culture in order to demonstrate the multiple ways in which blackness comes to be articulated in the limelight.
I am also at work on a second project that examines the capacity of the television medium to address and provide redress for anti-blackness. Moving across questions concerning TV aesthetics, politics, and ethics, this project contributes to film and media studies scholarship focused on the racial politics of representation and critical theory invested in mediations of violence.
In the News
“Talking Television in a Pandemic” 5-episode podcast series!
My Top 5 Television Shows of the Decade
“You is Kind, You is Smart, You is Important”; or, Why I Can’t Watch The Help
“Dimensions in Black: Perspectives on Black Film and Media” panel hosted by Film Quarterly at the Film Society at Lincoln Center (December 5, 2017)
Brandy Monk-Payton, Ph.D. 