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by Morgan Feddes, '10
As a Whitworth student, Susan Brown traveled to the U.K. for a semester on the British Isles Study Program her junior year. It was an experience that changed her life.
"The trip was packed with wonderful experiences throughout," Brown says. "It was the highlight of my time at Whitworth."
Brown's semester in the U.K. also gave her direction for her career path after graduation. She grew fascinated with English devotional songs from the 17th century, which eventually became the topic of her doctoral dissertation. Brown earned a degree in music from Whitworth and an M.A.T. in music from Portland State University. After earning her Ph.D. in musicology from Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, Calif., she completed three post-doctoral fellowships, at Yale, UCLA, and the Huntington Library, in San Marino, Calif.
Brown's fellowship work informs her recently released book, Singing and the Imagination of Devotion: Vocal Aesthetics in Early English Protestant Culture (Paternoster Press, England), which examines the significance of singing to early modern Anglicans and Puritans. The book also explores these Christians' study of the effect the voice has on the human soul. "During this era, singing became quite a focus of English theological and devotional writing, in part because of the experience of the Reformation and questions that arose about the role music should play in the developing Protestant denominations and domestic life," Brown says. The book can be purchased at www.authenticmedia.co.uk/paternoster.
Brown is currently an instructor of voice and music appreciation at Fullerton College, in California. She was also recently named a Fulbright Scholar. In January, she will travel to Vilnius, Lithuania, to teach for a full year at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre on her project "Tin Pan Alley Song: Eastern Europe and America Intersect."
"Tin Pan Alley" is a name that commonly describes a genre of American popular songs from 1880-1940. "I'll be working with department singers, music historians and actors as a coach, performer and lecturer," Brown says.
Brown previously spent two summers as a volunteer teaching English as a second language at the Lithuania Christian College, in Klaipeda. Through her service in Lithuania, Brown sees herself living out Whitworth's mission to serve humanity, a mission she says her Whitworth professors exemplified. "They were good role models as academics who were also imaginative and kind people," she says.
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