Guests O-Z

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:

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.

Linda O Keeffe is secretary to the Irish Sound Science and Technology Association and editor of the Interference Journal. Her practice is concerned with an exploration, both academic and creative, of the ways in which sound alters our experience of different spaces. Her art training was within the sculpture department of IADT under the tutelage of Finola Jones. She completed a Masters in Virtual Reality in NCAD with Kevin Atherton, and just finished a PhD in sociology in NUIM. Her research examined the urban of Dublin city soundscape as socially and technologically co-constructed. She has composed for dance, theatre, quartets, and new instrument performers, installed sound installations for commissions in Ireland, China and Holland, and has had radio works performed both nationally and internationally. In 2008 she was mentored under Eric Leonardson in Chicago, a sound artist and performer. More recently, she was commissioned by Resonance FM to create a work for radio for the 2013 Derry city of culture event. Current projects include a solo exhibition in November 2014 for the Limerick Sculpture Centre, which will be a creative realization of her PhD research. You can find her at www.lindaokeeffe.com.

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).

Andreas Duus Pape is an economist and a musician.  As an economist, he studies microeconomic theory and game theory—that is, the analysis of strategyand the construction of models to understand social phenomena—and the theory of individual choice, including how to forecast the behavior of agents who construct models of social phenomena.  As a musician, he plays folk in the tradition of Dylan and Guthrie, blues in the tradition of Williamson and McTell, and country in the tradition of Nelson and Cash.  He plays acoustic guitar, harmonica, and voice: although the technology of his musical production is a hundred years old, his ideas are often quite modern, and he covers songs as old as early last century and as recent as this one.  Pape is also an assistant Professor in the department of Economics at Binghamton University, where he teaches microeconomic theory at the undergraduate and graduate level.  He is a faculty member of the Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems (CoCo) Research Group: http://coco.binghamton.edu and considers complex systems and agent-based modeling to be central to his research.

Samantha Pinto is an Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University.   She is the author of Difficult Diasporas:  The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (forthcoming from NYU Press) and is working on a new project on early black celebrity and human rights discourse.  This research on radio is part of an in-process series of articles on institutional failure in the African Diaspora, Women’s Studies, and other critical sites of progressive political desire.

Murray Pomerance is Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is author, most recently, of Alfred Hitchcock’s America and The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (Polity; Rutgers; both 2013) as well as editor of numerous volumes including Cinema and Modernity (Rutgers, 2006).  In August 2009 he appeared on Broadway in conjunction with the The 39 Steps.

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.

Image courtesy of Flickr user andrej

Ian Rawes was born in 1965 and grew up in London where he’s spent most of his life. Since leaving school he’s worked as a printer, book designer, market stallholder, concert promoter and sound archivist. He now runs the London Sound Survey full-time and lives in a suburb of south-east London.

Lilian Radovac is a writer, organizer and doctoral candidate in communication studies at McGill University. She is currently finishing her dissertation on the cultural history of noise control in New York City, a chapter of which, “The ‘War on Noise’: Sound and Space in La Guardia’s New York,” was published in Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (John Hopkins, 2012). Her work has also appeared in Times Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

AO Roberts is a Canadian intermedia artist and writer based in Oakland whose work explores gender, technology and embodiment through sound, installation and print. A founding member of Winnipeg’s NGTVSPC feminist artist collective, they have shown their work at galleries and festivals internationally. They have also destroyed their vocal chords, played bass and made terrible sounds in a long line of noise projects and grindcore bands, including VOR, Hoover Death, Kursk and Wolbachia. They hold a BFA from the University of Manitoba and a MFA in Sculpture from California College of the Arts.

Tara Rodgers  is a composer and sound scholar based in the Washington, DC, area. She has taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Maryland, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 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.

Alexander Russo is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at The Catholic University of America. His research interests include the technology and cultural form of radio and television, sound studies, radio and television criticism, the development of “old” new media, the history of music and society, the relationship between media and space, and the history of popular culture.

reina alejandra prado saldivar is an art historian, curator, and an adjunct lecturer in the Social Science Division of Glendale Community College in Glendale, California and in the Cultural Studies Program at Claremont Graduate School. As a cultural activist, she focused her earlier research on Chicano cultural production and the visual arts. Prado is also a poet and performance artist known for her interactive durational work Take a Piece of my Heart as the character Santa Perversa (www.santaperversa.com) and is currently working on her first solo performance entitled Whipped!

Andrew J. Salvati is a Media Studies Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University. His interests include the history of television and media technologies, theory and philosophy of history, and representations of history in media contexts. Additional interests include play, authenticity, the sublime, and the absurd. Andrew has co-authored a book chapter with colleague Jonathan Bullinger titled “Selective Authenticity and the Playable Past” in the recent edited volume Playing With the Past (2013), and has written a recent blog post for Play the Past titled “The Play of History.”

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

Jentery Sayers is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria, where he teaches cultural studies, digital humanities, and 20th-century U.S. fiction. His writing has appeared in Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy; The New Work of Composing; Computational Culture; The New Everyday; Writing and the Digital Generation; Off Paper; Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies; and ProfHacker. Among his other work involving audio, his current book project is a cultural history of magnetic recording. 

Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. Recent book publications are: American Progress (2015), Sound as Popular Culture (2016, ed.), and Krieg Singen: Singing The War (2017, ed.).

A. Brad Schwartz co-wrote an episode of the award-winning PBS series American Experience on the “War of the Worlds” broadcast, based in part on research from his senior thesis at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is currently writing a book on Welles and War of the Worlds for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, to be published in 2015.

D. Travers Scott is Director of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Clemson University in South Carolina. He researches cultural and historic studies of new media, communication technologies, gender, and sexuality, often drawing on feminist and sound studies perspectives. Recent publications include a chapter in The First Time I Heard Joy Division/New Order and “Intimacy Threats and Intersubjective Users: Telephone Training Films, 1927–1962,” in the sound studies issue of American Quarterly(book version forthcoming). Current projects include co-editing with Devon Powers a special issue of the International Journal of Communication on critical historiography and revising his book manuscript, Sick: Constructing Users in Pathological Technoculture, under review with NYU Press. His former lives include advertising executive, novelist, and performance artist. You can find him at http://oneofthesethings.blogspot.com/

Susana Sepulveda is a PhD Student in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her developing dissertation project engages Chicana feminist studies, cultural studies, subcultural studies, and sound studies. She focuses on consciousness and subject formations in Chicana punk subcultures, emphasizing the importance of punk for understanding Chicana identities, subjectivities, consciousness, politics, and representations. Susana’s research has received support from the Barnard Library, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) of Arizona, the Women Studies Advisory Council (WOSAC), as well as numerous conference associations including the American Studies Association, the Cultural Studies Association, the National Women’s Studies Association, and Feminisms & Rhetorics. She earned her M.A. in Gender and Women’s Studies at UA, and her B.A. in Feminist Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In addition to her scholarship, Susana is the founder and organizer of the annual music fundraiser event Riot Grrrl Carnival, a punk musician in the Los Angeles based punk band Las Sangronas y El Cabron, zinester, and creator of the zine series “La Sangrona.”

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.

Shayna Silverstein is an assistant professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research generally examines the performative processes of politics, culture, and society in relation to sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East. Her current book project examines the performance tradition of Syrian dabke as a means for the strategic contestation of social class, postcolonial difference, and gender dynamics in contemporary Syria. She has contributed to peer-reviewed journals and several anthologies includingThe Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, and Modernity, Islam and Popular Culture,the Sublime Frequencies Companion, and Syria: From Reform to Revolt. Previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Humanities Forum, Shayna received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and her BA in History from Yale University.

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.

Jonathan Skinner founded and edits the journal ecopoetics, which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics: he has published essays on the poets Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ronald Johnson, Bernadette Mayer, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson; on Poetries of the Third Landscape, Documentary Poetics, and Poetry Animals; and an ethnographic study of the Tohono O’odham Mockingbird Speech. Skinner’s poetry collections include Birds of Tifft (BlazeVox, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Press, 2009), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). Skinner’s latest creative project is a book on the urban landscape designs of Frederick Law Olmsted. He is a 2011-2012 Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities.

Jacob Smith is Associate Professor in the Radio-Television-Film Department at Northwestern University. He has written several books on sound (Vocal Tracks: Performance and Sound Media [2008], and Spoken Word: Postwar American Phonograph Cultures [2011], both from the University of California Press), and published articles on media history, sound, and performance.

Emmanuelle Sonntag defines herself as a “knowledge organizer.” She offers consultancy services in communication, education, curriculum design, information management and knowledge mobilization while pursuing her PhD in Sociology on… Listening at Université du Québec à Montréal. She tweets on listening, sounds, stories and other noises @lvrdg.

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.

Justyna Stasiowska is a PhD student in the Performance Studies Department at Jagiellonian University. She is preparing a dissertation under the working title: “Noise. Performativity of Sound Perception” in which she argue that frequencies don’t have a strictly programmed effect on the receiver and the way of experiencing sounds is determined by the frames or modes of perception, established by the situation and cognitive context. Justyna earned her M.A in Drama and Theater Studies. Herthesis was devoted to the notion of liveness in the context of the strategies used by contemporary playwrights to manipulate the recipients’ cognitive apparatus using the DJ figure. You can find her on Twitter and academia.edu.

Jonathan Sterne teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University.  He is author of The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke, 2003), MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke 2012); and numerous articles on media, technologies and the politics of culture.  He is also editor of The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge, 2012).  Visit his website at http://sterneworks.org.

Karl Swinehart is Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Fellow at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a manuscript on hip-hop in Bolivia, Clear, Hidden Voices: Language, Indigeneity and Hip-Hop in Bolivia. He is a linguistic anthropologist with interests in media, popular music, social movements, racialization and multilingualism. He is co-editor of Languages and Publics in Stateless Nations, a special issue of Language and Communication. His work can also be found in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Language in Society, and Social Text.

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. .

Shawn VanCour is a media historian and lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the University of South Carolina. He has published articles on radio music and sound style in early television, as well as essays on Rudolf Arnheim’s radio theory and the origins of American broadcasting archives. He is currently completing a book on production practices and aesthetic norms for early radio programming and pursuing work for a second project on the radio-television transition of the 1940s-1950s.

Neil Verma is a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, where he teaches media aesthetics. Verma works on radio and its intersection with other media, and has taught subjects including film studies, sound, art history, literature, critical theory and intellectual history. His book, Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama, is published by the University of Chicago Press.

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.

Yun Emily Wang is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto, where her project explores how people living in diaspora make meaning through listening to sounds of music, speech, and everyday life.

Eric Weisbard is the author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music (University of Chicago Press), organizes the EMP Pop Conference, and is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama.

Alex Werth is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley.  His research looks at the routine regulation of expressive culture, especially music and dance, within the apparatuses of public nuisance and safety as a driver of cultural foreclosure in Oakland, CA.  It also considers how some of those same cultural practices enable forms of coordination and collectivity that run counter to the notions of “the public” written into law, plan, and property.  In 2016, he was a member of the curatorial cohort for the Matatu Festival of Stories and is currently a Public Imagination Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.  He lives in Oakland, where he dances samba and DJs as Wild Man.

Ben Wright holds a Provost Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Southern California in the School of Cinematic Arts. In 2011, he received his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture at Carleton University. His research focuses on the study of production cultures, especially exploring the industrial, social, and technological effects of labor structures within the American film industry. His work on production culture, film sound and music, and screen comedy has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is currently completing a manuscript on the history of contemporary sound production, titled Hearing Hollywood: Art, Industry, and Labor in Hollywood Film Sound.

Anne Zeitz is a researcher and artist working with photography, video, and sound media. Born in Berlin in 1980, she lives and works in Paris. Her research focuses on mechanisms of surveillance and mass media, theories of observation and attention, and practices of counter-observation in contemporary art. Her doctoral thesis (University Paris 8/ Esthétique, Sciences et Technologies des Arts, dissertation defence November 2014) is entitled (Counter-)observations, Relations of Observation and Surveillance in Contemporary Art, Literature and Cinema. Anne Zeitz was responsible for organizing the project Movement-Observation-Control (2007/2008) for the Goethe-Institut Paris and collaborated on the exhibition and conference Armed Response (2008) at the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg. She is a former member of the Observatoire des nouveaux médias (Paris 8/Ensad) and of the research project Média Médiums (Université Paris 8, ENSAPC, EnsadLAB, Archives Nationales, 2013/2014). Her most recent research concentrates on the work of the American artist Max Neuhaus with the publication of De Max-Feed a Radio Net (2014), part of the Média Médiums book series. She is the artist of this year’s Urban Photo Fest and participated at the Urban Encounters / Tate Britain in October 2014.

Christie Zwahlen is the Assistant Director at Binghamton University’s Center for Civic Engagement, where she has worked for four years to develop, expand and promote community engagement opportunities for students, faculty and staff. Previously, Christie worked for two years as an AmeriCorps VISTA, designing Service-Learning courses in conjunction with faculty at Thiel College and as the Coordinator of the Bridging the Digital Divide Program at Binghamton University. Christie earned her Master’s Degree in English and a Graduate Certificate in Asian & Asian American Studies from Binghamton University in 2009. She is currently enrolled in the English PhD program at Binghamton University.