Ryan C. Gourley is the Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on issues of imperialism, political ideology, and musical aesthetics in the former Russian Empire/Soviet Union and Northeast Asia. He will receive his doctoral degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Berkeley in May 2025, where he was a Chancellor’s Fellow for Graduate Study.

Ryan 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. The National Recording Preservation Foundation funded his 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, and the early Soviet Union.