Beretta E. Smith-ShomadeProfessor
For my entire career, I have examined and tried to understand, disrupt, and disseminate ideas about Black presences in visual culture. I've worked in several academic institutions including Spelman College, Georgia State University, the University of Houston, and Tulane University. In 2008, I received a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research and teach at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. This experience allowed me to see first-hand the connections, contours, and complexities of Africans and their descendants in the Diaspora. I've worked in media production as a production assistant at the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (now the PBS Newshour), as a freelance producer for Manhattan Cable Television, and as a music researcher at both WVEE-FM-Atlanta and WBLS-FM-New York.
My research has always explored Black representation, industrial concerns, production processes, and aesthetic and narrative constructions within television and larger Black popular culture. I have authored three books within these frameworks: Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television (Rutgers 2002), Pimpin' Ain't Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television (Routledge, 2007), and the most recent, Finding God in All the Black Places: Sacred Imaginings in Black Popular Culture (Rutgers, 2024). I have also edited two anthologies, Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences (Rutgers 2012)—a 2013 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and its remix, Watching While Black Rebooted! The Television and Digitality of Black Audiences (Rutgers, 2023). Beyond these works, my research appears across diverse journals and anthologies on subjects such as Black filmic representations, cable television, and Black spirituality and African-American women.
My current interests return me to creative scholarship, specifically documentary media making. I have a trilogy in the works that explores the linkages between Black mothers, Black mothers and their Black daughters, and Black daughters.
Associations
- Society for Cinema and Media Studies
- American Studies Association, Life Member
- National Communication Association
- Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., Diamond Life Member
Education
- PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, 1997
- MFA, Brooklyn College (CUNY), 1990
- BA, Clark College (Clark Atlanta University), 1988
Publications
