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; Creative Inquiry

Jonathan Leal is a scholar, critic, and composer-producer originally from the South Texas border region known as the Rio Grande Valley. In his work across disciplines and media, which includes books, albums, live performances, audiovisual projects, and more, Leal explores geographies of the imagination, the limits of inherited categories, and the need for novel connections across difference.

Leal is the author of Wild Tongue: A Borderlands Mixtape (Duke University Press 2026) and Dreams in Double Time: On Race, Freedom, and Bebop (Duke University Press 2023), which was a Finalist for the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award, the Woody Guthrie Book Award from IASPM-US, and the Book of the Year in History, Criticism, and Culture from the Jazz Journalists Association. Additionally, Leal is also the co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury 2021) and “Exercises in Joyful Improvisational Practice,” a special issue of liquid blackness (Duke University Press 2025). 

An award-winning drummer, Leal’s musical projects have been featured in Pitchfork, Democracy Now!, Texas Monthly, Remezcla, Latino USA, and elsewhere; his public writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, San Francisco Classical Voice, and elsewhere; and his interdisciplinary humanities scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, ASAP/Journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation, Rio Bravo: A Journal of the Borderlands, Journal of the Society for American Music, Jazz & Culture, American Literary History Reviews Online, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and elsewhere. From 2022–2025, he served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, where he co-chairs the Criticism category.

A former Emerging Critic with the National Book Critics Circle and AMS-50 Fellow with the American Musicological Society, Leal earned an interdisciplinary humanities PhD in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University. He is now an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Affiliated Faculty at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California.

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