Brandy Monk-Payton is a 2016–17 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in film and media studies through the Leslie Center for the Humanities at Dartmouth College. She obtained her PhD in modern culture and media at Brown University, where she was a Ford Foundation dissertation fellow and a graduate fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Her research interests include the history and theory of African American media representation, celebrity, television studies, and Black cultural studies. In fall 2017 she will begin a position as an assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University.