Guests

In addition to the work of the editorial collective and our regular contributors, Sounding Out! features the work of handpicked guest writers.  Peep them here in alphabetical order:

Wanda Alarcón is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley where her research involves reading Chicana and Caribbean “stories” together in a decolonial feminist vein. When she’s not living the glamorous grad student life she likes to make zines about po’try, learning new songs on her childhood piano, cooking for her loved ones, and exploring NorCal with her main squeeze. A native Los Angelena, she is beginning to appreciate thinking and writing about her beloved hometown from afar. Music helps bridge that distance. So do the trees and ocean breezes. She lives and loves kibbutz-style in Santa Cruz with her partner por vida, Cindy, their two sassy cats Lucy & Mona, and dear housemate, Ella.

Gina Arnold recently received her Ph.D. in the program of Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University, where she is currently a post doctoral scholar. Prior to beginning graduate work, she was a rock critic. Her dissertation, which draws on historical archives, literature, and films about counter cultural rock festivals of the 1960s and 1970 as well as on her own experience covering the less counter cultural rock festivals of the 1990s, is called Rock Crowds & Power. It is about rock crowds and power.

Bill Bahng Boyer is co-chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology Sound Studies Special Interest Group and a lecturer in music, writing and rhetoric at Dartmouth College. He is also a doctoral candidate in music at New York University, completing a dissertation on public listening in the New York City subway system.

R.N. Bradley is a PhD candidate in African American Literature at Florida State University. She writes about African American literature, race and pop culture, Hip Hop, and her own awesomeness. She earned her BA in English from the Unsinkable Albany State University (GA) and a MA in African American and African Diaspora Studies from Indiana University Bloomington. Her dissertation project looks at negotiations of white hegemonic masculinity and race consciousness in 21st century African American literature and popular culture. You can read her work atAllHipHop, Newsone, TheLoop21, or her monthly column “The Race to Post” over atPopMatters. Scholar by day, unapologetic Down South Georgia Girl 24/7/365. Catch up with her awesomeness via twitter: @redclayscholar and her blog Red Clay Scholar (http://redclayscholar.blogspot.com)

Dr. Mark Brantner is Interim-Director of First-Year Writing and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Initiative at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He earned his BA and MA (American literature and critical theory) from West Virginia University and his PhD (Rhetoric and Composition) from the University of South Carolina. He has done additional graduate work in philosophy and communication at the European Graduate School. He has previously held faculty positions at Potomac State College of West Virginia University and Eastern West Virginia Community and Technical College. His scholarly interests include ancient rhetoric, psychoanalytic theory, and writing program administration.

C.L. Cardinalehas a PhD in English Literature from University of California, Riverside.  Currently she is editing her manuscript on what she calls “look-listening”—deafened gestures—in twentieth century narratives.  She also publicly reads Proust, edits for Lettered Press, and sings with her one and six year old in California’s east bay.

Dolores Inés Casillas is currently making the free wifi rounds of every public establishment in Palo Alto, California.  She’s a faculty fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity and returning to her post as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara this fall. She writes and teaches on Latino media, language politics, and sound practices.

Steph Ceraso is a 4th year Ph.D. student in English (Cultural/ Critical Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in rhetoric and composition. Her primary research areas include sound and listening, digital media, and affect. Ceraso is currently writing a dissertation that attempts to revise and expand conventional notions of listening, which tend to emphasize the ears while ignoring the rest of the body. She is most interested in understanding how more fully embodied modes of listening might deepen our knowledge of multimodal engagement and production. Ceraso is also a 2011-12 HASTAC [Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory] Scholar and a DM@P [Digital Media at Pitt] Fellow.

Maile Colbert is an intermedia artist with a concentration in sound and video, living and working between New York and Portugal. She is an associated artist at Binaural/Nodar and director of Cross the Pond, an organization based on arts exchange between the U.S. and Portugal.  She holds a BFA in Studio for Integrated Media at Massart, and a MFA in Integrated Media/Film and Video from Calarts. She has had multiple screenings, exhibits, and shows, including The New York Film Festival, Ear to Earth Festival, LACE, MOMA, LACMA, the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, The PDX Film Festival, Future Places Festival Oporto, HOERENSEHEN 2.0 Berlin, Störung Festival Barcelona, Teatra Municipal in Guarda, Observitori Festival Valencia, and has performed and screened widely in Japan, Europe, Mexico, and North America, and co-composed for a featured installation at the 2009 UN Climate Conference. She was a visiting lecturer teaching at UCSD and Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, and guest artist and lecturer at NYU, MassArt, Calarts, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamton, Muhlenburg College, and Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She is currently in production on an interdisciplinary experimental opera based on Portuguese Maritime history, and will release two albums this year. You can find her at www.mailecolbert.com.

Ashon Crawley is a doctoral student in English at Duke University. His dissertation in progress, tentatively titled “Historicity and Black Studies: The Aesthetics of Black Pentecostalism” is an extension and critique of the disciplining of, in and as “black studies,” focusing on aesthetics, performance and sexuality as a social force with which institutional black studies must contend. He has published work in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, The Journal of Theology and Sexuality, Black Theology: An International Journal and in Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies.

Marcia Alesan Dawkinsis an award-winning writer, speaker, educator and visiting scholar at Brown University.  She is the author of Clearly Invisible: Racial Passing and the Color of Cultural Identity (Baylor UP, 2012) and Eminem: The Real Slim Shady(Praeger, 2013). Marcia writes about racial passing, mixed race identities, media, popular culture, religion and politics for a variety of high-profile publications.  She earned her PhD in communication from USC Annenberg, her master’s degrees in humanities from USC and NYU and her bachelor’s degrees in communication arts and honors from Villanova.  Contact:  www.marciadawkins.com

Peter DiCola is an assistant professor of law at Northwestern University.  He uses empirical methods and appliedeconomic models to study intellectual property law, media regulation, and their intersection. He received his JD and his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan. His research has centered on the music industry and related industries. In graduate school, he worked with the non-profit Future of Music Coalition on many research projects and he continues to serve on its board of directors. His current work focuses on copyright law’s regime for digital sampling and deregulation in the radio industry.

Nina Sun Eidsheim is Assistant Professor of Musicology at UCLA. She is working on a book about the moment music enters the body. During 2011-12 she’ll be a fellow at Cornell University, The Society for the Humanities, participating in a research group on Sound: Culture, Theory, Practice, Politics. In addition, she’ll co-convene a University of California Humanities Center Residency Research Group on voice (with Annette Schlichter) during fall 2011.

Juan Sebastian Ferrada is enjoying his last “real” summer before entering the Chicana andChicano Studies graduate program at UC Santa Barbara. He will focus on issues of language politics, such as accent studies, bilingualism, and linguistic capital. Currently, he joined the workforce as an event planner and is ecstatic to return to the academic life. A Chileno-Mexicano-L.A. native, Sebastian considers himself a Latina/o Pop Music connoisseur (Julieta Venegas, Paulina Rubio, Calle 13 anyone?). Sebastian resides in his hometown of Whittier, CA.

In his tenth year as a sports broadcaster, Robert Ford can usually be found at the ballpark, basketball arena or football field, depending on the season. Currently a reporter and radio pre- and post-game show host covering Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals, Robert has also been a radio play-by-play broadcaster for several minor league baseball, college and high school teams, allowing him to call places like Yakima, WA, Kalamazoo, MI and Binghamton, NY home at various points in his life. When he’s not talking into a headset, Robert is listening to a music collection that includes everything from Steely Dan to Jay Z, playing with his adorable daughter Elena or watching his beloved New York Giants, New York Knicks or Syracuse University Orange flummox their opponents. Robert grew up in the Bronx, NY, where he learned all the Spanish curse words and how to fall asleep on the subway without getting mugged or missing his stop. Follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/raford3 and read his blog: http://radioguydiaries.wordpress.com/

Benjamin Gold is a freelance writer from New Jersey. His thoughts on music and movies haven’t been published in that many places, but Askmen.com and PLANET° seem to like his work. For Sounding Out!, Ben explores the cultural, sociological, and emotional impact of rock n’roll. He graduated from Rutgers University in New Brunswick and doesn’t really want to go back to school, but he does maintain a personal blog. You can reach him at benjaminjordangold AT gmail.com.

David B. Greenberg is a graduate of Oberlin College, where he studied religion, with an emphasis on Modern American Religious History. His bachelor’s thesis was an ethnographic research study, “Highway Religion: Truckstop Chapels, Evangelism, and Lived Religion on the Road.” David also performs and records as a singer-songwriter, and currently lives in New Jersey.

Damien Keane is an assistant professor in the English department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is nearing the completion of a manuscript entitled Ireland and the Problem of Information.

Amanda Keeler (Ph.D., Indiana University, 2011) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bucknell University.  She teaches courses in film and media studies. Her current research focuses on historical emergent film, radio, and television; media history; media industries; and contemporary television.

Julia Grella O’Connell is a mezzo-soprano with international performance credits, and a music scholar whose writing has appeared in the Journal of Musicological Research and is forthcoming in the Italian American Review.

Primus Luta is a husband and father of two (maybe three by the time this goes up).  He is a writer and an artist exploring the intersection of technology and art, and their philosophical implications.  He is a regular guest contributor to the Create Digital Music website, and maintains his own AvantUrb site.  As an artist he is a founding member of the live electronic music collective Concrète Sound System, which spins off into a record label for the exploratory realms of sound in 2012. Luta is currently working on completing his first book, BeatGenealogy: A History of the Electronic Beat From WWII to Now.

Jeb Middlebrook holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of Minnesota. He is Director of the Solidarity Institute, and a Lecturer in Race, Social Movements, and Popular Culture at People’s University, in partnership with the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. His current book manuscript is titled, Black, Brown, Red, Yellow and White: Autonomous-Affiliate Organizing and Multiracial Movement-Making. Jeb’s work has been recognized by the Ford Foundation, the Harry S. Truman Foundation, the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, and the American Studies Association. He can be reached at jeb@solidarityinstitute.org, and on Facebook and Twitter.

Priscilla Peña Ovalle teaches Film and Media Studies in the English Department at the University ofOregon. After studying film and interactive media production at Emerson College, she received her PhD from the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television while collaborating with the Labyrinth Project at the Annenberg Center for Communication. Her most recent publications include Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom(Rutgers University Press, 2010),”Synesthetic Sabor: Translation and Popular Knowledge in ‘American Sabor’” (American Quarterly, 2009), and “Urban Sensualidad: Jennifer Lopez, Flashdance and the MTV Hip-Hop Re-Generation” (Women & Performance, 2008).

Scott Poulson-Bryant: Son, Brother, Friend, Writer, PhD Student, Fool. He’s currently doing American Studies at Harvard University, which means he studies literature and history. He has a secondary concentration in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Primarily, he’s interested in the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in post WWII American popular culture and the constructions and performances of masculinity that inform it.  He enjoys what most people think of as trashy novels (though, trash, I believe is in the taste of the beholder), cable TV dramas (nothing’s better than “Mad Men, “Sons of Anarchy” and “Breaking Bad,” may “The Shield” and “The Wire” RIP), queer theory (but NOT queer theoreticians), hiphop (anything before 2000), and sneakers (particularly Adidas), among other things. You can read more of Scott on his blog, Scott Topics, and you can follow him at Twitter http://twitter.com/SPBVIPor friend him at Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ScottPB.  And oh yeh, his novel The VIPs comes out from Random House next summer.

Tara Rodgers is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and a faculty fellow in the Digital Cultures & Creativity program at the University of Maryland. As Analog Tara, she has released electronic music on compilations such as the Le Tigre 12″ and Source Records/Germany, and exhibited sound art at venues including Eyebeam (NYC) and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto). Her collection of interviews, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, was published by Duke University Press in 2010. She is currently writing a feminist history of synthesized sound that examines productions of identity and difference in audio-technical language and representation. More info at Pinknoises.com; more lush photos of synthesizers on her blog analogtara.

Ted Sammons is completing a doctorate in anthropology at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Christina Sharpe is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University where she also directs American Studies.  Her book Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects was published in 2010 by Duke University Press.  Her current book project is Memory for Forgetting: Blackness, Whiteness, and Cultures of Surprise.

Aram Sinnreich is a writer, musician, media professor and consultant covering the media and entertainment industries, with a special focus on music. Named one of the fifteen “Innovators and Influencers of 2001″ by InformationWeek, Sinnreich is often quoted in media outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, Billboard, The Wall Street Journal and NPR. Sinnreich currently serves as Managing Partner of Radar Research, a media and technology consultancy, and is Assistant Professor at Rutgers University’s department of Journalism and Media Studies, where he focuses on new media and entertainment. He has written about music and the media industry for publications including The New York Times, Billboard, Wired News, Truthdig and American Quarterly. As a Senior Analyst at Jupiter Research in New York for over five years (1997-2002), he covered the online music and media industries and provided hands-on strategic consulting to companies ranging from Time Warner to Microsoft to Heineken. Most recently, as Director at OMD Ignition Factory (2009-2010), Sinnreich led a marketing innovation unit at the world’s largest media agency.

Gustavus Stadler teaches English and American Studies at Haverford College. He is the author of Troubling Minds: The Cultural Politics of Genius in the U. S.1840-1890 (U of Minn Press, 2006) and co-editor (with Karen Tongson) of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. His 2010 edited special issue of Social Text on “The Politics of Recorded Sound” was recently named a finalist for a prize in the category of “General History” by the Association of Recorded Sound Collections. He is currently working on Andy Warhol’s sound world, Woody Guthrie’s sexuality, and other stuff.

Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at USC, and the author of the forthcoming book, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, August 2011). She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Popular Music Studies (with Gustavus Stadler), and the series editor of Postmillennial Pop at NYU Press (with Henry Jenkins). By night, Karen can be found belting power ballads, flashing jazz hands and sipping bourbon at a seedy karaoke establishment near you. .

Gayle Wald is Professor of English at George Washington University. She is author of Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Beacon, 2007) and working on a book about the TV show Soul!, which brought a black power sensibility to PBS circa 1968-73.

Christie Zwahlen is currently serving her second term as an AmeriCorps VISTA at Binghamton University’s Center for Civic Engagement, where she coordinates Bridging the Digital Divide–a program that provides refurbished computers and information technology training to immigrants, refugees, the unemployed and youth living in poverty. She holds a Master’s Degreein English from Binghamton University and a Graduate Certificate in Asian and Asian American Studies.