Sonja M. Brown Givens University of Alabama at Huntsville

Sonja M. Brown Givens is Assistant Professor of Interpersonal Communication in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her research interests include the influence of mass mediated portrayals of socially marginalized groups on social decision making processes. Her collaborative work appears in Quarterly Journal of Speech with Dr. Celeste Condit from the University of Georgia. Her latest manuscript entitled “Mammies, Jezebels, and other controlling imagery: An examination of the influence of televised stereotypes of perceptions of an African American woman” is currently under review for Media Psychology. Works in progress include a manuscript entitled “Coping from the margins: The intersection of race, gender, spirituality and professional identity in African American graduate student experiences” which is currently being prepared for submission to Western Journal of Communication