|  | E-mail: jkun@usc.edu
Prior to joining the USC Annenberg school, Josh 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, he is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press) which won a 2006 American Book Award. His articles on popular music, the pop cultures of the US-Mexico border, and the music of Los Angeles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies. He is director of The Popular Music Project (www.usc.edu/pmp) at USC Annenberg's The Norman Lear Center.
As a critic and journalist, Kun is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and Tu Ciudad Los Angeles. 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 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.
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, 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. He has also worked as a consultant and curator with The Los Angeles Public Library, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Most recently, he co-founded Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit record label dedicated to excavating lost treasures of Jewish-American music, and co-launched the audioblog, hippocampusmusic. He is currently writing a book about Tijuana, Mexico.
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Scholarly Publications
Kun, J. (2007). Abie the Fishman: On Masks, Birthmarks, and Hunchbacks. In E. Weisbard (Ed.), Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (pp. 50-68). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Kun, J. (2007). Far Out Fred: The man behind Folk Songs for Far Out Folk. Guilt & Pleasure, 6.
Kun, J (2007). How We Listen. Guilt & Pleasure, 6. Kun, J. (2007). Jorge Hernandez. Bomb: A quarterly arts & culture magazine since 1981, 98. Kun, J. (2005). Bagels, Bongos, and Yiddishe Mambos, or The Other History of Jews in America. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 23(4), 50-68. Kun, J. (2004). File under: Post-Mexico. Aztlan, 29(1), 271-277. Kun, J. (2004). What Is an MC If He Can't Rap to Banda? Making Music in Nuevo L.A. American Quarterly, 56(3), 741-758. Kun, J. (2002). Two Turntables and a Social Movement: Writing Hip-Hop at Century's End. American Literary History, 14(3), 580-592.
Journalism/Other Writings
Kun, J. (2007, July). The Ballad of Music Man Murray. Los Angeles Magazine, 136-141, 212-216.
Kun, J. (2007, May 13). Mexico City's Indie Rock, Now Playing to the World. New York Times.
Kun, J. (2006, December 17). The New Sound of Mexico, Sung in a Nashville Accent. New York Times.
Kun, J. (2006, July 9). We Are a Band, and We Play One on TV. New York Times.
Kun, J. (2006, May 14). The Twiins: Mexican Music, Made in America. New York Times.
Kun, J. (2006, April 9). They're With the Band, Speaking That Global Lanage: Brass.New York Times.
Sites of Interest
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