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Venise Berry
Venise Berry is Professor in the UI School of Journalism & Mass Communication. She is the author of three national bestselling novels, So Good, An African American Love Story (Dutton/Penguin, 1996), All of Me, A Voluptuous Tale (Dutton/Penguin 2000), and Colored Sugar Water (Dutton/Penguin/Putnam 2002). In 2003 she received the Creative Contribution to Literature award from the Zora Neale Hurston Society. All of Me received a 2001 Honor Book Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Also in 2001 she was recognized with an Iowa Author Award from the Public Library Foundation in Des Moines.
Berry's research is in the area of African American Cultural Criticism. She is developing a theory called "racialism," which involves the influence of the media on African American images and messages. She is published widely in academic circles with numerous articles based on her research in the area of media, youth, and popular culture. Her two most recent nonfiction projects, The Historical Dictionary of African American Film (Scarecrow Press, 2005) and The 50 Most Influential Black Films (Citadel, 2001) are co-authored with her brother S. Torriano Berry, a professor in film at Howard University in Washington, DC. She also co-edited the book Mediated Messages and African-American Culture: Contemporary Issues (Sage, 1996), which won the Meyers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997.
Tim Havens
Tim Havens is Professor in the UI Departments of Communication Studies and African American Studies. His research and teaching interests include television studies; media globalization; race, ethnicity, and media; and critical analysis of media industries. He is the author of Black Television Travels: African American Media Around the Globe (2013) and Global Television Marketplace (2006); the co-author with Amanda D. Lotz of Understanding Media Industries (2011, 2016); the co-editor with Paul McDonald and Courtney Brannon Donoghue of Digital Media Distribution: Pipelines, Platforms, Portals (2021); and co-editor with Aniko Imre and Katalin Lustyik of Popular Television in Eastern Europe Before and Since Socialism (2012). He is a former Fulbright Scholar to Hungary, and holds affiliated appointments in African American Studies and International Studies.
Alfred Martin
Alfred Martin is Assistant Professor in the UI Department of Communication Studies.
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.
Martin's 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.
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.