Summary
Ruthie Meadows is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music and a Faculty Affiliate of the Gender, Race, and Identity Department (GRI).
Meadows’ research focuses on global circulations of music and sound of the Hispanophone and circum-Caribbean, with attention to sexuality studies and gender studies, ritual music, jazz, and ecology. In 2021, Meadows’ article on women and batá percussion in Cuba received the Society for Ethnomusicology’s (SEM) Jaap Kunst Prize, recognizing the most significant article written in ethnomusicology by a scholar in the first ten years of their scholarly career. Meadows’ first book, Efficacy of Sound: Power, Potency, and Promise in the Translocal Ritual Music of Cuban Ifá-Òrìs蹋à (The University of Chicago Press, 2023) offers the first book-length study on music and Ifá divination in Cuba. Efficacy of Sound explores the contentious Nigerian-style Ifá-Òrì艧à ritual movement on the island, examining translocal ritual sound in relation to concepts of efficacy and use, gender, revolutionary state policy, and transatlantic dialogue with Yorùbáland, Nigeria. Currently, Meadows’s second book project explores Cuban women in jazz and jazz fusion (fusión). Meadows’ articles appear in the journals Ethnomusicology, Latin American Music Review/Revista de Música Latinoamericana, and Popular Music History, with chapters in Digital LGBTQ Activism: A Global Perspective; Festival Activism; and Sun, Sound, and Sand: Music Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean.
From 2012-2016, Meadows worked in Havana, Cuba as a foreign ethnomusicology researcher affiliated with the Cuban Ministry of Culture's Juan Marinello Cuban Institute for Cultural Research (Centro de Investigación de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello, ICIC, 2014-2016) and as Resident Director for the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Global program at the University of Havana (2012-2015).
Meadows is also an avid electric guitar nerd who plays the violin, bass, and the Brazilian cavaquinho guitar.
Select publications
Book
- Efficacy of Sound: Power, Potency, and Promise in the Translocal Ritual Music of Cuban Ifá-Òrì艧à. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Peer-reviewed articles
- “Experimental Fusion (fusión), Ritual Batá, and Gendered Interventions: Women in Cuban Jazz.” Popular Music History. Vol. 15 No. 2-3: Special Issue: Jazz and Gender: Are We There Yet?, 213-233.
- “Queer Ecologies and Apocalyptic Soundings: The Caribbean Artivism of Rita Indiana.” Latin American Music Review /Revista de Música Latinoamericana. (44:2 Fall/Winter), 167-198.
- “Tradicionalismo africano in Cuba: Women, Consecrated Batá, and the Polemics of “Re-Yorubization” in Cuban Ritual Music.” In Ethnomusicology, Volume 65:1 (Winter), 86-111.
- Winner of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) Jaap Kunst Prize, recognizing the most significant article written in ethnomusicology during the first ten years of a scholar’s career (2021)
Co-authored
- The Anti-Colonial Death Studies Collective (Sayak Valencia, Lydia Huerta Moreno, Ruthie Meadows, and Dresda E. Méndez de la Brena). “What’s the Point of Feminisms if They Can’t be Trans?: Una reflexión desde o sur.” Women’s Studies in Communication. Special Issue on “Anti-TERF: Trans Feminisms against White Nationalist Projects.” Vol. 46, No. 2 (May), 223-229.
Peer-reviewed book chapters
- “Queer Cuarentena and “Mandinga Times”: Rita Indiana, Caribbean Artivism, and LGBTQ+ Social Media Spheres During COVID-19.” In Digital LGBTQ Activism: A Global Perspective, Ed. Paromita Pain. London, UK: Routledge, 8-23.
- “‘Jockamoe Fee-Nah-Nay!’: Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Creole Sensorialities and the Festivalization of New Orleans Musical Tourism”, In Sun, Sound, and Sand: Music Tourism in the Circum-Caribbean, Eds. Timothy Rommen and Daniel Neely. Oxford University Press, 238-264.
Education
- Ph.D., Ethnomusicology, University of Pennsylvania, 2017
- B.A., Latin American Studies and Spanish, Tulane University, 2005