Jeffrey McCune, Jr.

Jeffrey McCune Jr., an award-winning scholar on issues of race, gender, and identity, is the director of the University of Rochester's Frederick Douglass Institute and chair of the Department of Black Studies.

McCune has a bachelor’s degree in speech/theater and secondary education from Cornell College and a master’s degree in communications studies from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He earned his PhD in performance studies, with a focus on African American and gender studies, from Northwestern University. Before coming to Rochester, he served eight years as associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies and of African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s the author of Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing (University of Chicago Press, 2014).

At Washington University, McCune enjoyed a reputation as an engaging and stimulating professor. His sought-after course on Kanye West—“a case study for interrogating the interplay between fame, gender, sexuality, and race”—made a USA Today list of “11 college courses in pop culture we wish we could take” in 2017.