Jonathan Munby

My main research interests are in African American cultural history, the theory and history of Hollywood cinema, race, white ethnicity and crime in popular culture (including film, literature and popular music). I am currently engaged with the on-going challenges for black cultural production in the post-2008 context, while also looking backward at the unsung history of internationalist contributions to the freedom struggle--with a particular focus on the career of artist-activist Julian Mayfield. In addition to this I am beginning an examination of New Hollywood cinema through its gangster films and their construction of ethnic heritage and identity.

My research interests stem in part from my graduate studies in completing a PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota.

My research into African American cultural production and the freedom struggle has been sponsored by Harvard University's W. E. B. Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, of which I am an Alumnus Fellow.

These research areas are reflected in my key publications to date as well as my most recent and forthcoming ones:

Monographs:

Under a Bad Sign: Criminal Self-Representation in African American Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Public enemies, Public heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)

Forthcoming publications:

"Art in the Age of 'New Jim Crow': Delimiting the Scope of Racial Justice and Black Film since Rodney King", in Josephine Metcalf ed., African American Culture and Society After Rodney King (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015)

"African American Literature: Recasting Region through Race", in Susan Kollin ed., The Cambridge History of Western American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Some recent publications:

"The Work of Art in the Age of Hip Hop Reproduction: Ice-T and the Cultural Capital of Keeping It Real Again in Kings of Vice (2011) and Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (2012)", Journal for Cultural Research 17.4 (2013): 382-397