Ronald Radano is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in the history of US Black music and its transnational circulation. More recently, he has developed a second area of expertise in early sound recording and its participation in the early colonization of Africa. Radano studies music through the interpretive mechanisms of cultural theory and history, giving particular emphasis to the ideological formation of race. He teaches seminars and courses on a variety of topics, including global pop, African colonialism and its cultural critique, and cultural theory.
Radano is the author of two award-winning books, New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique(Chicago, 1993) and Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago, 2003), and coeditor of Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000) and Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique (Duke, 2016).