Richard Cullen Rath

Rich RathI am Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies here at the University of Hawaiʻ i at Mānoa.  I teach courses on race and ethnicity, Native Americans, new media, sound studies, and the senses.  I am the author of How Early America Sounded and I am currently working on two books, one an introduction to the history of hearing from the Big Bang to the present and the other comparing the rise of print culture in eighteenth-century North America to the rise of internet culture today.  I have recent articles on "How to Read Hypertext, "Hearing Wampum," "Noise and Silence," and "Ethnodigital Sonics." I also wrote three award-winning articles on music, creolization and African American culture. 

From Fall 2012 until 2018 I was founding director of the Digital Arts and Humanities Initiative at UH.  You can find out a little more about me—including some of my music, and copies of some articles I've written—here. Also, students at Oberlin College, Hamilton College, and UH have helped me develop a musical hypertext edition of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.  It is still under construction, but mostly usable.