Alice Echols

Office: RAB 205E

Office hours: Tuesday & Thursday

6:15-7:15 and by appointment

Email: aechols@rci.rutgers.edu

Alice Echols's work--her first book on second-wave American feminism, her biography of Janis Joplin, and perhaps most of all, her latest project on disco--grapples with the relationship between culture and politics. She is best known for her work on the social change movements and the popular music of the 1960s, but her forthcoming book, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Re-making of American Culture, extends her research into the 1970s, a rich but understudied period of American history. She has always worked and taught in an interdisciplinary fashion, largely because of her interest in gender studies, which dates back to her graduate studies at the University of Michigan. She was trained as a social historian, but over the years her scholarship has moved in the direction of cultural history and cultural studies. Her next book, about a Depression-era banking scandal in Colorado Springs, Colorado, blends cultural/social history with memoir. As for teaching, her classes range in topic from popular music and cultural history to varieties of American feminism and the history of sexuality.