Faculty

James Allan, Ph.D., has been the director of the alumni office at York since 2005. He earned his Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Massachusetts in 2003, specializing in media theory, gender and sexuality, and media research methods.

His Ph.D. thesis was titled "Fast Friends and Queer Couples: Relationships Between Gay Men and Straight Women in North American Popular Culture, 1959-2000." He has taught at New School University, Adelphi University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and has published essays in Media/Queered: Visibility and Its Discontents (2007) and In A Queer Country (2001).

Allan is interested in how media texts both emerge from and contribute to our experiences of ourselves and our collective cultures.

In particular, he is interested in understanding how sexuality operates as a field of power both in our media texts and our lived experiences. Drawing on textual analysis, audience research and ethnography, his work attempts to address the ways that cultural producers and consumers alike use media products in creating and circulating cultural knowledge.

He has written about Canadian queer cinema; masculinity and genderplay in gay male gym culture; the development of large, multivalent gay bar complexes in Montreal; queer alt-music scenes; and most recently the representational history of relationships between gay men and straight women.