Alex E. Chávez

Dr. Alex E. Chávez

University of Notre Dame
Alex  E.  Chávez

Artist-scholar-producer, Alex E. Chávez is the Nancy O'Neill 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: Music, Migration, and the Aural Poetics of Huapango Arribeño (Duke University Press, 2017)—recipient of the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology (2018). And in 2016 he produced the Smithsonian Folkways album Serrano de Corázon (Highlander at Heart). He has consistently crossed the boundary between performer and ethnographer in the realms of both academic research and publicly engaged work as an artist and producer. Chávez has recorded and toured with his own music projects, composed documentary scores (most recently Emmy Award-winning El Despertar [2016]), and collaborated with Grammy Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated artists. He is co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Ethnographic Refusals / Unruly Latinidades (S.A.R. Press), which grows out of an Advanced Seminar he co-chaired at the School for Advanced Research in 2019. In 2020, he was named one of ten Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and also recently concluded a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago. He currently also serves as a Governor on the Chicago Chapter Board of the Recording Academy.