Louis C. Elson Lecture: Josh Kun

Louis C. Elson Lecture:

"Search Results 0: Music and the Disappeared"

This talk will explore music as a response to the forced detention and disappearance of contemporary migrants in Mexico, the United States, and across the Mediterranean Sea. Based on interviews, archival research, and reporting, it listens to the music of the disappeared and to the songs and sounds fighting against contemporary disappearances. What is the presence that music creates in the face of absence? Can music repair the wounds of the missing? Is music a form of re-appearance?

The Louis C. Elson Lecture series was established in 1948 by Bertha A. Elson, as a tribute to her late husband.

About the Speaker:

Josh Kun is a cultural historian, author, and curator. He is the inaugural Vice Provost for the Arts at USC and Professor of Communication in the USC Annenberg School, where he is the inaugural holder of the endowed Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication. He is the founder and ongoing director of the Popular Music Project, a music and society research lab within the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2016), a Berlin Prize (2018), and an American Book Award (2006).

Kun is the author of the books: The Autograph Book of L.A.: Improvements on the Page of the City (Angel City Press, 2019), Double Vision: The Photography of George Rodriguez (Hat & Beard, 2018), To Live and Dine in L.A.: Menus and the Making of the Modern City (Angel City Press, 2015), Songs in the Key of Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2013), 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, co-author), and Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press, 2005).

He is the editor of The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2017), Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition, co-editor with Laura Pulido (University of California Press, 2013), Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, co-editor with Kara Keeling (John Hopkins University Press, 2013), Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border, co-editor with Fiamma Montezemolo (Duke University Press, 2012), and The Song is Not The Same: Jews and American Popular Music (Purdue University Press, 2011). His articles and essays have appeared in numerous books, academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and anthologies. As a journalist and critic, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. As a curator, his exhibitions, projects, and public programs have appeared with Getty, The Los Angeles Public Library, LACMA, California African American Museum, The Grammy Museum, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Huntington Library and Art Museum, and more. As an artist his work has appeared with SFMOMA, Prospect New Orleans, and Steve Turner Gallery.

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