Josh Kun is an associate professor in the Annenberg School for Communications and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where he also directs The Popular Music Project at The Norman Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society. His research and teaching focus on the arts and politics of cultural connection, with an emphasis on popular music, the cultures of globalization, the United States-Mexico border, and Jewish-American musical history. He is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press) which won a 2006 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and 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). He also wrote the introduction to the republication of Papa, Play for Me (Wesleyan University Press), the autobiography of musical comedian Mickey Katz. He is currently a contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and Cabinet. In 2005, he co-founded Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit record label dedicated to excavating forgotten treasures of Jewish-American music, and in 2008 co-founded The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, a digital archive of Jewish musical history.

Josh Kun will also deliver a lunch workshop at noon the same day.