Assistant Graduate Advisor for Media Studies (MA & PhD)
Jennifer McClearen is a feminist media scholar whose research examines the cultural production of identity and difference in popular media with a specific interest in sports media industries. She probes the ways sports media defines, perpetuates, or contests discourses of gender, race, sexuality, and nationality through the lenses of feminist theory, cultural studies, sports media industries, and promotional culture studies. She does so by weaving discourse analysis, textual analysis, and ethnographic methods throughout her work. Her research and teaching interests also include feminisms in popular culture, intersectionality, Black and Latinx feminist approaches to media, the body and embodiment, transgender identities, digital and participatory culture, branding and consumer culture, neoliberalism, and labor in media industries.
Dr. McClearen’s first book, Fighting Visibility: Sports Media and Female Athletes in the UFC, was published with the Studies in Sports Media Series with the University of Illinois Press in March 2021. Her research can also be found in Communication and Sport, the International Journal of Communication, Continuum, New Formations, Feminist Media Studies, and The Velvet Light Trap, among others.
She is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Sports Communication and Media and the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries at UT and a diversity scholar with the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan.
