Ryan C. Gourley is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley working at the intersection of global music history, media archeology, and cultural mobility studies. His scholarship explores issues of imperialism, political ideology, and musical aesthetics in the Russian Far East and Northeast Asia. His doctoral research has been supported by the William F. Holmes / Frank D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies from the American Musicological Society, the Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellowship from the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Chancellor’s Fellowship for Graduate Study at UC Berkeley. More about his dissertation.

Ryan currently serves as Vice President of the Music Study Group of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and webmaster for the Cold War and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society. He is a founding member of the Berkeley Art and Ethnography working group at UC Berkeley. Since 2018, he has curated the Collection of Recorded Sound at the Museum-Archive of Russian Culture, San Francisco. His project to preserve and digitize the collection has been funded by the National Recording Preservation Foundation. The digital collection is hosted on the Internet Archive and the Russian-Records (Мир русской грамзаписи) database, including recordings produced in the late Russian Empire / early Soviet Union, the Republic of China, and the Japanese Empire. More about the project.