M. Nicole Horsley is an Assistant Professor of African Diaspora Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Screen Cultures at Ithaca College. Nicole’s primary research and teaching centers the interplay between Black visual culture, sexual economies, Black ontologies, consumption, material culture, dis/ability and sensualism to explore the politics of pleasure and perversion grounded in close contextual reading practices. She confronts the undertheorized explicitness of the Black sexual body in her first monograph (in progress), influenced by her dissertation, Nasty Girls: Reclaiming the Black Freak in Music Videos and Sonic Culture, which focused on live performances and music videos of Black female soul, rhythm and blues singers and hip hop rappers to argue that vivid and imaginative tropes of “Black femininity” are constructed within these mediums, countering repressive representations of Black subjectivity and the tyrannies of silence. 

Nicole is also a member of the Pleasure Project, a collective of scholars in Canada and the U.S. who were recently awarded an Emerging Projects Award for the 2023-2024 year at the Queer and Trans Research Lab (QTRL) in the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. She is an associate editor for the Journal of Hip Hop Studies. A 2020–2021 Faculty Excellence Award recipient she believes the classroom can be a site of radical love and transformative justice. Through legacies of Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Grace Lee Boggs, and others she reimagines the neoliberal institution offering care and curriculum, which nurtures creativity, and centers radicalizing joy to assist students with interrogating power structures and methods of resistance. With looking to those who have come before us and imagining new worldviews, we can move toward constructing alternative futures. She is a part of a local Black film series, returning to iconic silent films, experimental shorts, musicals, Nollywood, music videos, documentaries, coming of age, horror, Afrofuturistic, and home movies to consider the future of African American and African diasporas cinemas.  When not confronting white supremacy and antiblackness, she appreciates daydreams about the beach during winters in upstate New York. A South Central Los Angeles, California native, she enjoys reading, horror and avant-garde cinema, attending live musical performances, museums, and traveling. She completed a doctoral degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies and Film and Media Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. She has also earned master’s degrees in Women’s Studies and Education from Claremont Graduate University and an undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles.