Jonathan Ritter

Assistant Professor

Ph.D., 2006, University of California, Los Angeles

E-mail: jonathan.ritter@ucr.edu
Phone: (951) 827-6097
Office: Arts 139

Jonathan Ritter is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on the indigenous and Afro-Hispanic musical cultures of Andean South America. He received his M.A. (1998) and Ph.D. (2006) in ethnomusicology from UCLA, where he was a student of Anthony Seeger, and his B.A. (summa cum laude) in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota (1994). At UCR, he teaches numerous courses on Native American, Latin American, and “world music” traditions, and is the director of Mayupatapi, the UCR Andean Music Ensemble.

Prof. Ritter’s work, as both a scholar and a teacher, addresses broad questions of how musical expressions are implicated in the work of cultural memory and social activism, particularly during times of political violence. His current book project, Blood River: Music, Memory, and Violence in the Peruvian Andes, explores these themes as they emerged within the traditional and folkloric music of Ayacucho, Peru, in the context of the Shining Path guerrilla insurrection and ensuing “dirty war” that took place in that region (1980-90s). Together with NYU colleague J. Martin Daughtry, he is co-editor of Music in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge, 2007), a collection of essays by ethnomusicologists and other music scholars exploring both domestic and international musical responses to the attacks of September 11th, 2001, as well as the myriad ways that ensuing political and military actions have changed the very circumstances in which musicians create and perform today all over the world.
 
Ritter has also published articles and reviews on Native American, Afro-Ecuadorian and Andean musics in Ethnomusicology, the British Journal of Ethnomusicology (now Ethnomusicology Forum), The World of Music, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology, Bulletin of the Society for American Music, and Percussive Notes, as well as numerous entries on Peruvian and South American music in the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (Continuum, 2005) and the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture (Thomson Gale, forthcoming). Beyond music scholarship, he is also the author of a short monograph, A Work in Progress: Autonomy on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast (Institute for International Cooperation and Development, 1995), which analyzes the political and cultural challenges that faced Nicaragua’s indigenous Miskito population in the wake of the Contra War of the 1980s.
 
Ritter is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including research funding from the Fulbright Institute for International Education and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He was also awarded the Charles Seeger Prize in 2002 by the Society for Ethnomusicology.
 
Prior to his appointment at UCR, Ritter taught courses in ethnomusicology at Soka University of America and Chapman College, and from 2002-2004 was the founder and director of a multidisciplinary performance series, Fowler Out Loud!, at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

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