Jonathan Ritter

Associate 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. and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from UCLA, and his B.A. in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota. 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 political activism, particularly during times of political violence. He is currently completing a book manuscript, We Bear Witness With Our Song: Music, Memory, and Violence in the Peruvian Andes, that 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 conflict that took place in that country. Related to this work, Ritter has also published an edited collection of conference proceedings, “Music and Politics in the Andes” (Diagonal 2, 2009) featuring works on the topic by many of the leading music scholars working in the Andean region. Together with NYU colleague J. Martin Daughtry, he is also 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’s scholarship on Andean, Afro-Ecuadorian, and Native American musics has also appeared in numerous academic journals and encyclopedias, including Ethnomusicology, the British Journal of Ethnomusicology (now Ethnomusicology Forum), and the Yearbook for Traditional Music, and he currently serves as a Contributing Editor (Andean Music) for the Handbook of Latin American Studies. 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 war that devastated the region in 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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