Alexandra T. Vazquez’s research and teaching interests focus on popular performance, music, Caribbean aesthetics and criticism, U.S. Latina and Latin American Studies, race and ethnicity, and feminist theory and biography.

She is the author of The Florida Room (Duke University Press, 2022), chosen by Pitchfork as one of the best music books of 2022. Her previous book, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Duke University Press 2013), won the American Studies Association’s Lora Romero Book Prize in 2014. Her work has been featured in such journals as small axe, American Quarterly, Social Text, women and performance, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies; and in the edited volumes Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, Keywords for Latina/o Studies, Reggaeton, The Tide Was Always High, and Pop When the World Falls Apart. You can also find her writing on the great Celia Cruz on NPR’s “Turning the Tables” series. In 2010-2011, she received a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship.  Prior to coming to NYU, Vazquez was an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Center for African American Studies at Princeton University (2008-2015) and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University (2006-2008). 

Vazquez was recently awarded a Faculty Fellowship from the NYU Center for the Humanities.  In 2021, she was honored as the recipient of the David Payne-Carter Teaching Award, presented to the Tisch School of the Arts faculty member whom students have selected as best instilling a deepening comprehension and enthusiasm for the arts as well as a desire to seek further knowledge.

Vazquez is a proud graduate of the New World School of the Arts high school in Miami, Florida.