Meet 2009's Emerging Scholars
TIMOTHY D. ARNER
Arner is an Assistant Professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches classes on medieval literature, literary analysis, the history of the English language, and the ancient Greek world. He received his PhD in 
English from Penn State University in 2007. His current book project, entitled Trojan Wars: Genre and the Politics of Authorship in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, considers the development of the Trojan legend in England from the 14th through the 17th centuries, with particular attention to the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, William Caxton, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare.
Arner’s research interests include the intersections between politics and literature and the reception of classical texts in medieval and Renaissance England. Apart from his work on the Troy story, Dr. Arner has published an article on Chaucer and Boccaccio (Studies in Philology, 2005) and co-authored an article on the Old English poem Christ III (JEPG 2007). He is now completing an article on republicanism in the poetry of Lucan, Chaucer and Shakespeare.
DEVON POWERS
Powers joined the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University in Fall 2008. She received.jpg "Devn Powers")
her Ph.D. in January 2008 from New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, and holds a B.A. from Oberlin College. Her work spans the fields of media studies, journalism studies, and history by focusing on the relationship between popular culture, especially music, and cultural intermediaries—those whose jobs place them between producers and consumers of culture and who do the work of circulating, critiquing, and interpreting cultural relevance.
Powers is currently revising a book manuscript about rock critics at the Village Voice in the 1960s, and in May is co-organizing a conference on promotional culture at New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge.
Read the abstract for "What Is Hype? Circulating Popular Music from Beatlemania to the Blogosphere"
MELISSA STEIN
Stein is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Gender Studies Department at Indiana University, 
Bloomington, where she teaches courses on race, gender, and sexuality in science and medicine. She received her B.A. from Franklin & Marshall in 1999 and her Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University, specializing in African-American and gender history. While at Rutgers, Stein was head research assistant at the Center for Race & Ethnicity, a graduate fellow at the Institute for Research on Women, and an Excellence Fellow at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. Her publications include essays on “Race as a Social Construction” and “Class” in Black Women in America (Oxford University Press, 2005), and on “Misogyny” in The Encyclopedia of Women in World History (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Stein’s book project, “Embodying Race: Gender, Sex, and the Sciences of Difference, 1830-1934,” is a gendered analysis of scientific racism in nineteenth and early twentieth century America that traces biomedical constructions of citizenship, investigates the relationship between racial science and sexology, and examines scientist's responses to racial violence. Her teaching and research interests include the body, racial thought, sexuality, U.S. cultural and intellectual history, African-American history, women's and gender history, and the history of science and medicine.
SONJA TRENT-BROWN
Trent-Brown is a member of the Psychology Department at Hope College in Holland, Mich., and teaches
courses in Introductory Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Advanced Research in Perception and Psychoacoustics and Psycholinguistics. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Harvard/Radcliffe University, and her M.A. in Experimental Psychology and Ph.D. in Cognitive and Neural Sciences from the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, Florida. Trent-Brown was a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and continues to serve with McKnight's Tribble International Society of Interdisciplinary Scholars.
Trent-Brown's research is in the areas of perception and psychoacoustics and explores language perception and the acoustic correlates that give rise to perceptual interpretations. She has worked extensively with cross-language speech perception and production with various languages, including American English, Japanese, German, Spanish, and African American English. Her current work investigates speaker identification with respect to voice quality characteristics and the extent to which spectral and temporal acoustic cues contribute to accurate identifications.
Read the abstract for "Voice Quality: Resonance Characteristics in Speaker Identification"
Emerging Scholars Named at Franklin & Marshall/Schedule of Events
FOR MORE INFORMATION: MARCY DUBROFF (717) 291-3837
E-MAIL: MARCY.DUBROFF@FANDM.EDU
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