Rate My Professor Marquese McFerguson

Dr. Marquese McFerguson serves as an Assistant Professor of Intercultural Communication within the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, part of the Communications faculty. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of South Florida (2020), an M.A. from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (2010), and a B.A. from Ouachita Baptist University (2005). Joining Florida Atlantic University in the Fall 2020 semester, McFerguson’s academic career focuses on fostering understanding across cultural divides through scholarly inquiry into identity formation and media representation. His research specializations encompass Critical Media Studies, Hip Hop Studies, Gender Studies, Performance auto/ethnography, and Intercultural Communication. McFerguson investigates how individuals in society communicate, perform, and re-imagine identities across diverse cultural intersections, including race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. His scholarship centers on building bridges of understanding by analyzing how racialized identities are produced and portrayed by media makers and interpreted and performed by media audiences. Guided by feminist, aesthetic, and narrative sensibilities, his work is situated within the interdisciplinary fields of Communication Studies, Media Studies, and African American Studies. Courses taught by McFerguson include COM 4930 – Hip Hop: Communicating Identity, COM 4703 – Storytelling: The History of Slam/Spoken Word Poetry, and SPC 3710 – Intercultural Communication.

In addition to his academic contributions, Dr. McFerguson is an award-winning slam poet, storyteller, and teaching artist who has performed at academic institutions and performance venues across the United States and the United Kingdom. He has delivered a TEDx talk emphasizing the power of storytelling to inspire social change by encouraging listeners to understand perspectives different from their own. A key publication co-authored by McFerguson is 'The Future of Autoethnography is Black' in the Journal of Autoethnography (2020, with A. Durham, S. Sanders, and A. Woodruffe). His research and teaching draw from personal experiences to diversify the academic canon, re-imagining scholarly representation and promoting art-based methods to share knowledge with broader audiences. McFerguson aims to use his work to highlight commonalities among seemingly disparate groups, ultimately advancing intercultural dialogue and social transformation.