Mark Anthony Neal: Professor, Author, and Social Commentator
Posted on 02. Apr, 2010 by Leshell Hatley in American Studies, Faculty, I'm a Full Professor!, Research, Scholarly Celebrations
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including SeeingBlack.com, The Root.com, theGrio.com, and of course on his own blog about his research into contemporary and historical issues of race and Black culture, New Black Man – http://newblackman.blogspot.com.
Neal has appeared in several documentaries including Byron Hurt’s acclaimed Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), John Akomfrah’s Urban Soul (2004) and the BBC’s Soul Deep: the Story of Black Popular Music (2005).
(from his personal website)
- I am engaged in interdisciplinary scholarly work in the fields of African-American, Cultural, and Gender Studies that draws upon modes of inquiry informed by the fields of literary theory, urban sociology, social history, postmodern philosophy, Queer theory and most notably popular culture. My broad project is to interrogate popular culture–music, television, film, and literature–produced within the context of Afro-diasporic expressive cultures. It is my belief that popular culture represents an arena of knowledge that has a profound impact on societal and cultural norms in the United States and globally, but one that has been largely underscrutinized as a “serious” site of scholarly and theoretical study. It is also my belief that commercial popular culture represents a distinct site of ideological production, thus my own work aims to engage the ideological undercurrents within commercial popular culture particularly within the context of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity.
Education
He holds a Doctorate in American Studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Author
Neal is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). An Array of his book covers appear below.
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Information courtesy of wikipedia, Duke University, and Neal’s personal blog.
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