David J. Leonard

Dr. David J. Leonard examines contemporary representations within popular culture, examining the broader social, political, and cultural meaning. His research agenda focuses on the systematic treatment of the politics of representation in post-civil rights America. It explores the complex linkages and slippages, intersections and ruptures, that dialectically tie together racialized bodies with political, social, cultural, and economic identities, structures and discourse. Dr. Leonard’s work explores, documents, and illustrates the various manifestations of the narrative, ideological, and financial commodification of black bodies within popular media all while highlighting the dominant frames that facilitate, fuel, and in turn generated through the broader discursive field. While disparate in topic, ranging from the prison industrial complex to the NBA, from the video games to the history of African American television, his work is linked by its commitment to examining the ways in which blackness is constructed, transformed, and challenged across time and space; within a multitude of institutions and affecting a number of communities. It is linked together by the ways in which blackness is imagined and represented within contemporary popular culture and how those representations connect to fear, violence, and institutional formation.