Editorial Collective

Editor-in-Chief and Guest Posts Editor Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman received her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. Her dissertation, “The Contours of the Sonic Color-Line: Slavery, Segregation, and the Cultural Politics of Listening” was a 2007 finalist for the American Studies Association Dissertation Prize. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Popular Music Studies and has published in The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Identities, and Social Text; her essay on Blackboard Jungle, the cold war, and the early cultural history of tape recording is forthcoming in American Quarterly (September 2011).  Currently Assistant Professor at SUNY Binghamton, Jennifer teaches courses on African American literature and race and gender representation in popular music and is Director of the Binghamton University Sound Studies Collective.  She is also co-editing an anthology on “The Politics of Recorded Sound” with Gustavus Stadler.  Jennifer is pleasantly obsessed with old high fidelity test records, Tony Schwartz’s recordings of NYC, and the many many ways people define “noise.”  During 2011-2012, she’ll be a fellow at The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, participating in the research group on Sound: Culture, Theory, Politics.

Managing Editor Liana Silva is a  newly minted PhD from the English department at SUNY Binghamton who works as a Graduate Writing Specialist at the University of Kansas. She is also a regular contributor for the Inside Higher Ed blog University of Venus. Liana’s dissertation, Acts of Home-making, is a study of how African-Americans and Puerto Ricans represent New York City as a home. She comes to sound studies from the angle of cultural studies, where she wonders about the music we listen to and its sociocultural implications. Liana is currently working on an article on representations of American cities in hip hop. When she’s not talking about writing and thinking deep thoughts, she is busy defending pop culture on an intellectual level, recording her daughter’s latest babbles on her iPhone, listening to sports talk radio, and asking people where “home” is.

Multimedia Editor Aaron Trammell is a PhD student in the Media Studies department at Rutgers University. He is concerned with the dissonance of spaces, sounds and games as they are translated and transposed into digital media platforms. Presently, Aaron is working with a research team to understand how information moves through the underground punk scene in New Brunswick, NJ. Aaron has recently begun a love affair with qualitative research, they are planning to elope in his dissertation.