Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration.