Tony Adams

Biography

Dr. Adams started at Bradley University in the Fall of 2017. Prior to Bradley, he was a faculty member at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU). In 2017, he was honored to be named the Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor, the highest research award at NEIU; in 2021, he was honored to be named a Caterpillar Professor, the highest research award at Bradley.

Much of Dr. Adams’s research focuses on sexual diversity and queer concerns such as stigma, social support, and self-disclosure. In his first book, Narrating the Closet, he identified struggles with disclosing same-gender attraction—often referred to as “coming out (of the closet).” He described experiences of sexuality before, during, and after coming out, as well as demonstrated how the coming out process never ends as every new audience makes for a new time to disclose one’s desires. He also studies queer spaces, fetish communities, and media representations, as well as how queer folks live with others who commit homophobic and transphobic slights.

In addition to this research, Dr. Adams is dedicated to strengthening the international and interdisciplinary community of autoethnography—a method that blends personal storytelling with ethnographic practice. He has facilitated workshops on autoethnography at numerous institutions, including the University of Iceland, the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, and the Universidad de Santiago de Chile.

Dr. Adams has published 100+ articles and book chapters, four books, and six edited collections. His writing has been translated from English to Spanish, German, Greek, and Japanese. He is a co-editor of the Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives book series and founding co-editor of the Journal of Autoethnography. In 2023, he created the Certificate in Autoethnography program at Bradley, a globally accessible program that surveys what autoethnography is and how to do it.

Dr. Adams is a proud first-generation college student. He received his A.S. (Business Administration) from Danville Area Community College, a B.A. (Radio-Television) and a M.S. (Speech Communication) from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and a Ph.D. (Communication) from the University of South Florida. He attended Catholic school for his early education, worked as a bartender at Yellowstone National Park, has played softball for many years, and has been a vegetarian since 1998.