Jason Borge
Professor — Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies

Contact
- E-mail: jason.borge@austin.utexas.edu
- Phone: 512-232-4542
- Office: BEN 3.136
- Campus Mail Code: B3700
Interests
Latin American popular music and sound studies, including Brazil; film and media studies; transnational American Studies; early-to-mid 20th century cultural history; literary and cultural vanguards; new jazz studies
Biography
Although I earned my doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures (UC Berkeley, 2002), a great deal of my scholarly work is interdisciplinary in scope and methodology, overlapping with popular music and sound studies, hemispheric American studies, cultural and intellectual history, and film and media studies. Over all, my research interrogates the intra-hemispheric dimensions of Latin American cultural production, and specifically the critical reception and imaginative re-appropriation of US mass culture of the early and middle 20th century.
In the last few years, my main scholarly focus has been the development and completion of my book Tropical Riffs: Latin America and the Politics of Jazz (Duke University Press, 2018). This work examines the ways Latin American cultural discourse (music criticism, literature, film, etc.) shaped jazz as a central performative practice, political anc cultural touchstone, and emblem of transnational modernity from the 1920s through the 1980s. Tropical Riffs emerged out my previous book projects, Latin American Writers and the Rise of Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, 2008), and Avances de Hollywood: Crítica cinematográfica en Latinoamérica, 1915-1945 (Beatriz Viterbo, 2005), both of which dealt with the critical and creative impact of the US film industry in the region during the early and middle 20th century. In addition to my books, I have published numerous articles in such journals as Hispanic Review, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Luso-Brazilian Review. At the moment, I am beginning two distinct but related projects. The first is a biographical work focused on the globetrotting jazz musician Booker Pittman. The grandson of Booker T. Washington, Pittman was a seminal yet elusive figure in jazz circles in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay from the 1930s until his death in the 1960s. My second work-in-progress, which I have tentatively titled Gringo Latitudes, examines the cultural margins and critical dimensions of pan Americanism from the 1930s to the 1970s.
I came to UT Austin in 2009 as an Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture, after having spent seven years at Vanderbilt University as an Assistant Professor. Besides teaching a wide range of upper-division undergraduate courses in Spanish, Portuguese, and English at UT, I have taught graduate seminars on such topics as "Popular Vanguards," "Latin American Cinema and Transnationalism," "Strangers, Borders, and Empire," "Cinema, Sound, and Politics in the Americas," and most recently, "Critical Pan-Americanism." In addition, I have supervised dissertations on research topics such as television sketch comedy in Argentina, cultural pan-Americanism in Brazil, and classical Hollywood and trans-Atlantic hispanidad.