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 in-process book project, Ambivalent Listening: Race, Music, and Slavery in the British Colonial Caribbean 1750–1838, investigates the relationship between race and music in the British colonial Caribbean, exploring the many ways that African-descended musicians and listeners engaged with music with European origins. This work is supported in 2024–25 by an ACLS Fellowship, NEH Fellowship, and Citizens and Scholars Career Enhancement Fellowship. Early work from this project can be seen in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Journal of the American Musicological Society.

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. She holds the B.A. degree from the University of Nottingham, the M.Mus. degree from King’s College London, and the Ph.D. in musicology with a certificate in Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

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.