Faculty

Josh Kun is Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Vice Provost for the Arts at the University of Southern California. He is also an author and editor of books and anthologies and a curator of art, music and public humanities projects. Kun’s research and practice examine the intersections of music, culture and politics, with a focus on popular music, archives, global migration and Los Angeles.

He has collaborated with cultural institutions including The Getty Foundation, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Grammy Museum, the California African American Museum and The Vincent Price Museum of Art. From 2013 to 2019, Kun led a trilogy of projects based on the special collections of the Los Angeles Public Library that resulted in a series of books, exhibitions and public programs. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker.

Kun co-edits the book series Refiguring American Music for Duke University Press, serves on the editorial boards of Public Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies and Music Research Annual, and serves on the boards of Dublab and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. He co-curates CALA Crossfade Lab and directs The Popular Music Project at the Norman Lear Center. Kun is a MacArthur Fellow and has received the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin and an American Book Award.