The interests of award-winning Cuban and Latin American music scholar and administrator Susan Thomas include performative and mediatized manifestations of and reactions to transnationalism, migration and diaspora, as well as the musical intersections of gender, race, embodiment and performativity. Thomas received significant grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for which she is leading research projects related to the music cultures of southern Colorado and photoplay music for silent film. She also founded the journal, Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, for which she serves as editor-in-chief.
The author of numerous articles and book contributions, Thomas’ book "Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage" was awarded the Robert M. Stevenson Prize from the American Musicological Society and the Pauline Alderman Book Award from the International Alliance of Women in Music. Currently, she is completing her second book, "The Musical Mangrove: The Transnationalization of Cuban Alternative Music," for Oxford University Press.