Ryan C. Gourley is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of global music history and cultural mobility studies. His research addresses issues of imperialism, political ideology, and musical aesthetics in Northeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. He will receive his doctoral degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Chancellor’s Fellow for Graduate Study and a Dissertation Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities. He currently serves as webmaster for the Cold War and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society and secretary for the Music Study Group of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.

His monograph in progress, East by Far East: Music and Migration in Colonial Manchuria, delves into the forms of musical hybridity that developed out of mass migration and colonial domination in Manchuria. Narrated from the First Sino-Japanese War to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the project introduces a new understanding of cultural mobility and identity amidst violent political strife.

The National Recording Preservation Foundation funded Ryan’s project to preserve and digitize the Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco. As the curator of the collection, he has digitized hundreds of 78 rpm records for the first time, including recordings produced in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Republic of China, the United States, and the early Soviet Union.