Professor Kun's research focuses on the arts and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on popular music, the cultures of globalization, the US-Mexico border, and Jewish-American musical history. He is director of The Popular Music Project (www.usc.edu/pmp) at USC Annenberg's The Norman Lear Center and co-editor of the book series "Refiguring American Music" for Duke University Press.

Prior to joining the USC Annenberg school, Kun was Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. He holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley. A former Arts Writers Fellow with The Sundance Institute and a former fellow of the Ucross Foundation and The Mesa Refuge, he is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press) which won a 2006 American Book Award. He is co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail of Our Vinyl: The Jewish Past As Told By The Records We've Loved and Lost (Crown, 2008), and wrote the introduction to the re-publication of Papa, Play For Me (Wesleyan University Press), the autobiography of musical comedian Mickey Katz.  

His articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies, covering everything from the sound worlds of the Mexican border and the lost histories of Jewish mambo and Jewish jazz, to African-American and Latina/o musical exchange in Los Angeles.  

In 2005, he co-founded Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit record label dedicated to excavating lost treasures of Jewish-American music that has been featured in The New York Times and on National Public Radio.

As a critic and journalist, Kun is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Los Angeles Magazine. From 1998-2006, he wrote "Frequencies," a bi-weekly music column published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Boston Phoenix. His writing has also appeared in Tu Ciudad Los Angeles, Cabinet, LA Weekly, The Believer, Guilt & Pleasure, Village Voice, SPIN, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, and in Mexico's La Jornada and Proceso. He has written the liner notes to CDs by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Maldita Vecindad, and Sammy Davis Jr.

His journalism on the US-Mexico border earned him a 2007 Unity Award in Media and made him a finalist for a 2007 Southern California Journalism Award.

In 2005, Kun was a regular critic on The Movie Show With John Ridley on American Movie Classics, and he has also appeared as a culture critic on ABC, The Disney Channel, National Geographic TV, UPN, Fox Latin America, BBC Radio, and National Public Radio. From 1999-2000, he hosted The Red Zone, Southern California's first commercial Latin Rock radio program, on 107.1 FM and in 2002 was the show's host on MTV-español. From 2003-2005, he hosted and associate produced Rokamole, a weekly Latin alternative music video show on KJLA-LATV.