Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women's Studies
jmccune@umd.edu
Jeffrey Q. McCune Jr. holds a joint appointment in the Women’s Studies and American Studies departments, while also being a faculty affiliate in our LGBT Studies program. Prior to his joining our faculty, he was the University of Rochester’s Frederick Douglass Institute Postdoctoral Fellow, as well as a faculty associate in the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies. Professor McCune brings exciting and high quality scholarship and teaching to the University of Maryland-College Park. His research and teaching interests include popular culture, critical race/gender/sexuality theory, masculinities, whiteness studies, and 20th-century African American literature and culture.
Professor McCune has several projects in the works. His most recent project is the turning of his dissertation into a book, tentatively entitled Quaring the Closet: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Sexual Passing. This manuscript maps the evolution of the “Down Low” (DL)—men who traditionally identify as “straight” while having sex with other men—refusing to employ the standardized descriptors of sexual identity. It is an ethnographic and media-centered exploration, which addresses the layered complexities of the representation of DL men and their lived experiences. Most importantly, this project challenges the utility and traditional understanding of the closet, especially when considering minoritized experiences and different constructions of queerness/quareness. Jeffrey has several publications, in print and forthcoming, which generally explore issues of race, gender, and sexuality. Over the course of his graduate study, Professor Mccune began to develop a collection of essays that investigate the queer intersection of heterosexual black male performances of “Big Momma” and white queer male performances of the same. After completion of the aforementioned project, he plans to collate these essays into a manuscript that will interrogate the use of excess in male comedic performances, by way of the black female body.
In addition to his more traditional academic pursuits, he is an actor, playwright, poet, and public speaker. In fact, he is presently working on a play that re-visits notions of the “racist south” in the mid-twentieth century, based on his grandmother’s experience in rural Mississippi. This play, though not void of conflict and traces of racism, tells an alternative narrative to the hostile and antagonistic stories of black-white relation. Professor McCune feels blessed to be apart of the University of Maryland-College Park’s faculty and community.
Degrees:
Ph.D. Performance Studies (Northwestern University, 2007)
M.A. Communication Studies (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
B.S.S. Speech/Theatre and Secondary Education (Cornell College)
Courses:
Black Masculinites
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