Ryan Skinner is serving as the Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellow in ERIK for the 2024-25 academic year. In this role, Skinner:
- provides insights and support that enhance and elevate the distinction of research and creative expression in the humanities and arts.
- leverages existing relationships and develops others that increase interdisciplinary research and creative expression throughout the Ohio State community.
- creates formal feedback that appropriately benchmarks current programs and identifies opportunities to expand research and creative expression at Ohio State.
Skinner is a musical anthropologist who studies the expressive cultures and social worlds of contemporary Africa and its European diaspora, with extensive fieldwork conducted in Mali and Sweden.
“It is a great pleasure and privilege to support and celebrate the amazing range of humanistic scholarship and creative practice at our university,” said Skinner. “Through grant support, collaborative projects and community-building gatherings, I hope to signal the fundamental importance of the Arts and Humanities at Ohio State.”
Specializing in the analytic and interpretive methods of cultural anthropology and ethnomusicology, Skinner’s research focuses on issues of popular culture, ethics and aesthetics, public piety, cultural policy, intellectual property, racial identity and politics, and new social movements in Africa and its Diaspora. Skinner is the author of Bamako Sounds: The Afrpolitan Ethics of Malian Music (2015) and Afro-Sweden: Becoming Black in a Color-Blind Country (2022), both published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Skinner serves as Area Head of Music Theory and Musicology in the School of Music. He holds affiliations with the Departments of French and Italian and Germanic Languages and Literatures.