Dr. Mary Caton Lingold is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she also directs the PhD Program in Media, Art, and Text (MATX). She is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the literature, culture, and music of the African Atlantic world, as well as the fields of sound studies and digital humanities.

Mary Caton’s publications include a forthcoming book, African Musicians in the Atlantic World: Legacies of Sound and Slavery (UVA 2023), a co-edited volume Digital Sound Studies (Duke 2018), as well as articles in journals such as Early Music, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Early American Literature. She guest-edited a special issue of Reviews in DH on the subject of sound and co-created the website Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica. Mary Caton also founded a database of sound recordings called the Sonic Dictionary, and produced a podcast about a song by an enslaved woman named Tena.

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, white racism, and Black history and culture. Much of her research focuses on 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.

Photo by Eduardo Montes-Bradley.