Dan Margolies

Dan Margolies is the director of strategic initiatives. Before coming to UNC Hussman, he worked as the first director of strategic initiatives at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, where he articulated artistic and development strategies in Latino and Native American multi-disciplinary programming. He created the Guadalupe’s first culturally relevant literacy program and for four years produced the Tejano Conjunto Festival, the most significant festival for this Mexican-American music.

Originally trained as a historian, Margolies has expertise in U.S. foreign relations with an emphasis on legal spatiality. He has published widely about historical, legal and musical topics. Margolies’ most recent book is the first full study of COVID-related music, titled ¡Maldito Coronavirus! Mapping Latin American Musical Responses to the Pandemic Moment (co-authored with J.A. Strub).

Margolies was a tenured professor and chair of the history department at Virginia Wesleyan University, where he taught U.S. and Asian history for two decades. Margolies was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea, a faculty fellow at the American Center for Mongolian Studies in Ulaanbaatar, and twice a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California-Berkeley.

Margolies is co-founder and artistic director of the Festival of Texas Fiddling, a non-profit event based in San Antonio now in its 10th year, and a director at Sonté in New Orleans, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting musical interventions for wellbeing.