Dr. Mary Caton Lingold is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she directs the PhD Program in Media, Art, and Text (MATX). She is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the early modern African Atlantic world. Her research and teaching involve the study of literature, music, sound, digital media, and the cultural history of slavery. Mary Caton is the author of African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery (UVA 2023), a co-edited volume Digital Sound Studies (Duke 2018), and articles in journals such as Early Music, Atlantic Studies, and Early American Literature. In addition to written works, Mary Caton produced a podcast about a song by an enslaved woman named Tena and co-created the website Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica.

Before earning a PhD in English and a graduate certificate in African & African American Studies from Duke University in 2017, Mary Caton earned an MA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BA from Trinity University in Texas. Growing up in the rural U.S. South shapes her interest in Atlantic slavery, racism, and Black history and culture. Much of her research focuses on the Caribbean, a region key to the development of traditions and ideas that spread across the Atlantic world in the early eras of slavery. Mary Caton is a lifelong musician, and she enjoys singing and playing multiple instruments.