Lecture: Sonorous Present: Songs of Border Crossings, Sunrises, and Mournings

School for Advanced Research
Humanities Festival Lecture Presentation

Alex E. Chávez
Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

Alex E. Chávez addresses how his work crosses the sunburst surreal of America’s musical and cultural borderlands, refiguring the borders of both performance and intellectual engagement to strategically reimagine the possibilities of how a studio album can sound and the forms scholarship can take.

Alex E. Chávez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also a Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Latino Studies. His research explores articulations of Latinx sounds and aurality in relation to race, place-making, and the intimacies that bind lives across physical and cultural borders. He is the author of the multi-award-winning book Sounds of Crossing—recipient of three book awards, including the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018)—and has published widely, including in American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of American Folklore, Latino Studies, and Latin American Music Review.