Jonathan Ritter is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of California, Riverside. He received his MA and PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA, and his BA summa cum laude in American Indian Studies from the University of Minnesota.

Prof. Ritter’s work, as a scholar, teacher, and musician, 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 has conducted field research with Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples throughout the Americas, including extended work in Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Peru. As a musician, he has performed with various Andean music ensembles in South America and the United States, including directing UCR’s Latin American Music Ensemble from 2004-2020.

Prof. Ritter is co-editor, with J. Martin Daughtry, of Music in the Post-9/11 World (Routledge, 2007), and author of A Work in Progress: Autonomy on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (IICD, 2016, 2nd ed.). He recently guest edited a special issue, “Music, Politics, and Social Movements in Latin America” for the interdisciplinary journal Latin American Perspectives (2023). His current book project, We Bear Witness With Our Song: The Politics of Music and Violence in the Peruvian Andes (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) draws on more than two decades of research in Peru on that country’s testimonial song movement that emerged during the armed internal conflict that accompanied the Shining Path guerrilla insurgency. Ritter is also a Contributing Editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Latin American Perspectives, Popular Music and Society, and Ñawpa Pacha: A Journal of Andean Studies.

See https://profiles.ucr.edu/app/home/profile/jritter.