BIO

Jennifer McClearen is an Assistant Professor of Sports, Media, and Culture in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Sports Communication and Media and the Center for Media and Entertainment Industries at UT. She completed her Ph.D. in 2017 in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington where she was an affiliated researcher with the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity. 

Dr. McClearen’s research interrogates intersecting discourses of gender, race, sexuality and other identities in sports media branding and marketing and considers how industry professionals use these discourses to inform how they promote sports. She further analyzes the disconnect between inclusive rhetoric circulating in sports media and the labor practices within sports that disenfranchise those same identities. She has been published in journals such as Communication and Sport, the International Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies, and others and published her first monograph in 2021 with the University of Illinois Press. More information about her research can be found here.

Professor McClearen has been teaching in some capacity since 2002. Prior to joining the academy, she taught English in Spain, the Czech Republic, and Mexico and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco where she taught English, health, and wellness. Her courses at UT Austin focus on identity and representation in popular media industries. More information about her teaching can be found here.

Jenn lives in Austin with her partner and two fur babies. In her spare time, she can be found taking her dogs for long walks and practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.