Maria Ryan

Assistant Professor of Musicology Maria Ryan researches and writes about how African and African-descended people in the Americas theorized, performed, and listened to music with European origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Ryan’s book, Listening in the Archives of Slavery: Music and Violence in the British Colonial Caribbean (University of California Press, forthcoming 2027), investigates the diverse musical lives and listening practices of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the British colonial Caribbean, dwelling on what it meant to make music, listen, and be listened to in a place of extreme violence. This work was supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars.

Ryan has published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and American Music, and is currently working on a co-authored book, Guide to Sources in Early Black Atlantic Music, for Oxford University Press with Emily Green and Mary Caton Lingold. In addition to her work on music in the British colonial Caribbean, Ryan researches and teaches Black feminist theory, the intellectual history of Black music, and book history and archive studies. Ryan is a Senior Fellow in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School, where she focuses on methods for recuperating Black listening practices from sources created under colonial logics.

Ryan’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from ACLS/Mellon, American Musicological Society, American Historical Association, Society for American Music, and Library Company of Philadelphia.

If you are a prospective musicology graduate student or would like to discuss Ryan’s work, please feel free to contact her at mtryan@fsu.edu.

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