Jonathan Leal

Music and Sound Studies; Transdisciplinarity / Undisciplinarity; Comparative Media Poetics; Relational Studies of Race and Ethnicity; Chicanx and Latinx Media and Literatures; Modernity/Coloniality; U.S.-Mexico Border Aesthetics and Narratives; Speculative Inquiry

Jonathan Leal is a Latino author, critic, and composer-producer invested in creative resistances to bordered life. Born and raised in the South Texas border region known as the Rio Grande Valley, Leal creates integrative arts and research projects that span media and focus on place, memory, technology, and radical aesthetics. 

Leal’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, ASAP/Journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Rio Bravo, Journal of the Society for American Music, Jazz & Culture, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, liquid blackness, and elsewhere; his essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Air/Light Magazine, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, San Francisco Classical Voice, and elsewhere. In 2018–2019, he was both an Alan Cheuse Emerging Critic with the National Book Critics Circle and an AMS-50 Fellow with the American Musicological Society. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, focusing on criticism and poetry. 

Leal’s recent creative work has included sound and music design for Cherríe Moraga’s The Mathematics of Love; a collaborative compilation album, Wild Tongue, featuring music by nine Latinx bands from the South Texas borderlands; a collaborative, speculative transmedia cast album entitled Futuro Conjunto; a six-part jazz suite exploring post-utopian sentiment, entitled After Now; as well as several singles and collaboratively composed musical compositions. His musical collaborations have been featured in Pitchfork, Democracy Now!, Texas Monthly, Remezcla, Latino USA, Bandcamp, and elsewhere. 

Leal is the author of Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke University Press 2023), which received an Honorable Mention for Book of the Year in History, Criticism, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association, and the co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury 2021). His next book project, Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape, is under contract at Duke University Press.

• Ph.D. Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford University, 2020
• M.A. English, University of North Texas, 2014
• B.A. English, University of North Texas, 2012