Jennifer Stoever, predoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester's Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, will present the next Work in Progress Seminar sponsored by the institute. Stoever's topic, titled " 'If Not in the Word, In the Sound': Listening as a Trope in African-American Literature," will deal with how sound and the act of listening is represented in the work of Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright. She argues that these writers represent listening as a critical process for understanding how race and power operate in American culture.

Stoever is a doctoral candidate in the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her primary research areas include 20th-century American literature and popular culture, African-American and multiethnic literatures, cultural studies, and popular music.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the Frederick Douglass Institute at (585) 275-7235.