Faculty

Jonathan Leal is Assistant Professor of English at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. His research and creative practice examine music and sound studies, comparative media poetics and the cultural politics of race and the U.S.-Mexico border. Born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley, Leal’s work spans books, editorial projects and interdisciplinary arts initiatives exploring cultural connection and creative resistance.

He 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 and the Jazz Journalists Association Book of the Year in History, Criticism and Culture. Leal is also co-editor of Cybermedia: Explorations in Science, Sound, and Vision (Bloomsbury, 2021) and a special issue of liquid blackness.

His work has appeared in publications including Pitchfork, Democracy Now!, Texas Monthly, Remezcla and Latino USA, and in Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rumpus. Leal’s scholarly writing appears in journals including Journal of Popular Music Studies, ASAP/Journal, Critical Studies in Improvisation and Journal of the Society for American Music.

From 2022 to 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. Leal is a former National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critic and American Musicological Society AMS-50 Fellow.