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Jonathan Leal

Assistant Professor of English
Jonathan Leal
Pronouns He / Him / His Email lealjona@usc.edu

Research & Practice Areas

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

Biography

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...

Education

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

  • Tenure Track Appointments

    • Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Southern California, 2022 –

    PostDoctoral Appointments

    • Postdoctoral Scholar, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, University of Southern California, 2020 – 2022

  • Research Specialties

    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

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