Faculty Profile for Dr. Alan Grant

Biography Section

Biography and Education

After graduating from Stanford University with a degree in English Literature, I spent five years in the National Football League, playing for the Indianapolis Colts, San Francisco Forty Niners, Cincinnati Bengals, and Washington football team.
I then spent twelve years as a features writer for Espn the Magazine. I also created a column called “AG Raw,” a weekly exploration of sport and culture. I have written literary critiques on the works of Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy. I have also contributed to the Hollywood Reporter and Yahoo Sports.
In 2002, I wrote a book called Return to Glory, the story of Tyrone Willingham’s first season as Notre Dame’s first ever Black coach.
I’ve been a guest lecturer at Indiana University, the City College of New York, Boston College, and the University of North Carolina, Asheville. Topics have included how to maintain integrity in reporting, techniques for writing the technical essay, and race in sport.
I was also an instructor for the National Football League’s Journalism Boot camp—a three-day seminar for current and former players who aspire to careers in mass media.
I have a master’s degree in Communication Studies from Texas State University and a PhD in Communication Studies from Texas A&M University.

Teaching Interests

I have used my most significant class— Introduction to Communication Through Sport—to introduce students to various perspectives and points of view. Through the collaborative lens of team sport, I’ve constructed the course as an intersection of communication theories. I prefer to weave my social justice initiatives into the course as opposed to making them “stand alone” concepts. For instance, I assembled a team of teaching assistants comprised of students from various nationalities, ethnicities, and sexual persuasions to lead group discussion on a variety of topics. I also assign each teaching assistant a “mini-lecture” on the topic that most aligns with their academic focus. The mini lecture series has included “Understanding Latin X,” “The Korean Exchange,” and “Challenging Binaries.” Through these presentations, and the discussions they inspire, we engage the basic tenets of social justice education, which are 1) Acknowledge who is in the room, 2) Meet the students where they are (ideologically), 3) Institute sessions specifically related to race, class, gender, ability, 4) Acknowledge my own biases, and 5) Encourage students to think critically about everything—including me.

Research Interests

While a writer at ESPN, I once wrote a column on middle class Black people and their lack of media representation. After a conversation with my editor, I realized I was no longer a columnist. I was a media critic. So, after a 13-year career as a journalist, I applied my penchant for cultural observation to academic inquiry.

The current landscape in American spectator sport is defined by its capacity to illuminate social disparity, civic unrest, and the tribalistic factions through which the American fanbase (and electorate) expresses its views and pledges its loyalties. To that end, American spectator sport, as much as any aspect of American society, allows for extended examination of civic engagement. I believe in coalition building and as such I’ve collaborated with like-minded academics who share my intellectual curiosity and who pursue that curiosity through sport. I was an advisor for David Shields, the writer-in residence at the University of Washington, on his film called Lynch: A History; a documentary that examines the racial anxieties that White spectators project onto Black athletes. Dr. Thomas Oates, of the University of Iowa cited my essay on the homoerotic subtext of the N.F.L. Combine to frame his journal article called the “Erotic Gaze,” that was published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies in 2007. In 2021 I collaborated with Michael Butterworth as part of a panel for a Short Course on Diversity and Inclusion in Communication and Sport at the National Communication Association Conference.
As the current climate around social movements has become collaborative, my current research is grounded in racial ventriloquism. I specifically explore how a White ally transcends the physical performance of “speaking for others” in order to examine how ventriloquism intersects with power and authority— to the extent that adding voices to our own voice lends weight to what we are saying. Ventriloquism complicates the question of who is actually speaking in a given situation as our speech, according to Mikhail Bakhtin, is “populated by other people’s words.” I see ventriloquism as a conceptual frame, wherein a speaker throws his or her voice into a space in order to amplify (and not obscure) the voices of those who already inhabit that space. That makes such a space purposely deliberative. As such, my primary text has been a speech that United States National Women’s Team soccer player Megan Rapinoe delivered at an awards ceremony in 2020. Rapinoe, who, like Kaepernick, had knelt during the national anthem, attributed her unfettered opportunity to pursue a living in sports to her white privilege. In so doing, Rapinoe “throws her voice” into a social movement that has been historically framed by Black men. Rapinoe, a self-identified White, lesbian woman, and outspoken representative for the LGBTQ community, recontextualizes the kneeling gesture and transforms the movement into one that is racialized, gendered, and universal.
My research is founded upon the language of nonverbal and verbal protest and how Megan Rapinoe successfully inserted herself into a significantly “Black” movement by fusing the language of protest with performative allyship. I employ concepts of voice, allyship and speaking for others (which I call “benevolent racial ventriloquism”) to trace the evolution of protest to the present time, which I have deemed the Black Celebrity Renaissance.