Rate My Professor Jennifer Stoever

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is an Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York, specializing in Literature with a focus on sound studies. She holds a PhD and MA in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California, and a BA from the University of California, Riverside. Stoever's research explores African American literature and culture, 19th- and 20th-century American literature, American studies, popular music, sound and audio culture studies, race and theories of representation, digital humanities, and civic engagement. She is the author of the acclaimed book The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016), which investigates how everyday sounds and listening practices have reinforced racial ideologies and white supremacy in American soundscapes. Her scholarship has significantly impacted sound studies, influencing initiatives such as the “Stand For Sonic Diversity” pledge adopted by major audio platforms like Pandora and SiriusXM to promote diverse voices in advertising. Stoever's articles have appeared in leading journals including American Quarterly, Sound Effects, Modernist Cultures, Radical History Review, Social Text, Social Identities, and Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies. Notable publications include “Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwartz Remixes Postwar Nueva York” (2010) and “Fine-Tuning the Sonic Color-Line: Radio and the Acousmatic Du Bois” (2015). She has a forthcoming chapter, “Crate Digging Begins at Home: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and 70s Bronx,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music Studies.

In addition to her academic contributions, Stoever co-founded and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog, a key platform for interdisciplinary sound scholarship, and holds editorial board positions with Sound Studies, Senses and Society, and Social Text. Her career at Binghamton includes directing the Binghamton Historical Soundwalk Project, a community-engaged initiative funded by the Whiting Foundation that involved students in archiving local sounds and histories through soundwalks and installations. She co-directs the Binghamton Punk D.I.Y. Community Archive and is a founding member of the Engaged Digital Humanities Working Group. Stoever has received numerous honors, including the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2014), Honorable Mention for the Harpur College Graduate Teaching Award (2017), Society for the Humanities Fellowship at Cornell University (2011–2012), Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities Fellowships at Binghamton University (2013 and 2017), Engaged Teaching Fellowship (2015), Whiting Foundation Public-Facing Scholarship seed grant (2018), and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2023).