He is the Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching.
[1] He hosts the weekly webcast Left of Black in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
A frequent commentator for NPR, Neal contributes to several on-line media outlets, including Huff Post Black Voices and SeeingBlack.com.
In this work, Neal interprets the vast array of issues and overlapping instances that create black music and culture.
[3] OutKast's song "Rosa Parks" exemplifies the aesthetic as the duo "bastardized" black history and culture, to create an alternative meaning.
[5] Furthermore, Neal explains the often confrontational nature by which post-soul figures are received by the more established and antiquated black community like the NAACP.
He illustrates his thesis through the use of black vernacular forms to produce a voice that is both streetwise and scholarly ...Neal may be the first writer capable of developing groundbreaking ideas in the academy and getting a new sticker on his ghetto pass in one stroke.
Here Neal analyzes the many ways in which black masculinity is constructed, reconstructed, read and misread in contemporary American culture.