Brandy Monk-Payton

Brandy Headshot

Contact
[email protected]
718-817-4861

Location
Faculty Memorial Hall, Room 435

Website
www.brandymonkpayton.com

  • PhD, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University

    MA, Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

    BA, Film and Media Studies, Swarthmore College

  • Brandy Monk-Payton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media Studies and affiliated faculty in the Dept. of African & African American Studies at Fordham University. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the interdisciplinary program in American Studies. Her research focuses on theories and histories of Black media representation and cultural production across television, film, and digital media. Her work has been published in journals such as Television & New Media, Film Quarterly, The Journal of e-Media, Persona Studies, Celebrity Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Women's Studies in Communication, and Communication, Culture and Critique. She also has chapters in edited collections such as Watching While Black Rebooted!: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences and Black Cinema & Visual Culture: Art and Politics in the 21st Century.

    Dr. Monk-Payton has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered to discuss the racial politics of The Bachelor franchise and interviewed on PBS NewsHour about media depictions of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In 2022, she served as an expert panelist on a virtual briefing for the Congressional Multicultural Media Caucus focused on Black creatives and the fight for attribution on the internet. Her expertise is quoted in various entertainment and news outlets such as Variety, The New York Times, The 19th News, InStyle, Time, The Hollywood Reporter, and more. She is currently working on two book projects: one on television and Black Lives Matter and another on contemporary Black celebrity culture. 

  • “Look at My African-American: On Authoritarian Populism, Blackness, and Celebrity.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 63.2 (Winter 2024), 162-168.

    “The Art of Notoriety in Kanye West’s Persona.” Persona Studies 9.3 (2023), 21-37.

    “‘I’m Trying to Make People Feel Black’”: Affective Authenticity in Atlanta.” Watching While Black Rebooted!: The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences, 2nd Edition. Ed. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade. Rutgers University Press (2023).  

    “Black Celebrity Matters: On the Instability of Fame.” Celebrity Studies 13.1 (2022), 115-122.

    “Staging Womanist Visibility in Red Table Talk.” Women’s Studies in Communication 43.4 (2020), 333-340.

    “Introducing the First Black Bachelorette: Race, Diversity, and Courting Without Commitment.” Communication, Culture and Critique 12.2 (June 2019), 247-267.

    “#LaughingWhileBlack: Gender and the Comedy of Social Media Blackness.” Feminist Media Histories 3.2 (Spring 2017), 15-35.

  • Television Theory and Criticism
    Ethics of Reality TV
    TV, Race, and Civil Rights
    African American Cinema
    Race, Gender, and Digital Media (PMMA)