Alice Echols is Professor of History, and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at USC. She is the author of four books that have shifted our understanding of the “long Sixties.” Her first, “Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75,” was a pioneering social and intellectual history of second-wave feminism, one that emphasized its vital but vexed relationship to Black Power and the New Left. In 1990, “Daring” was named a Gustavus Meyers Outstanding Book Winner. Her second book, “Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin,” is a biography of the rock singer and a cultural history of the counterculture and the music scene of which Joplin was a part. It was named one of the “Best Books of 1999” by the “Los Angeles Times.” Echols’s articles have appeared in scholarly journals such as “Social Text,” “Criticism,” and “Socialist Review,” and in popular publications such as “The Nation,” “The Village Voice,” “LA Weekly,” “Women’s Review of Books,” and “BookForum.” Many of them appear in her collected essays, “Shaky Ground: The Sixties and Its Aftershocks.” Her most recent book, “Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture,” probes disco’s “hotness,” which Echols locates in disco’s upending of America’s racial rules and gender and sexual conventions. Music is often understood as reflecting societal change, but “Hot Stuff” demonstrates that music can itself enact change. Echols has been featured on ABC’s “20/20,” The History Channel’s “1969,” and the BBC’s (and Biography Channel’s) documentary “Southern Discomfort: Janis Joplin.” She has been interviewed at length by the “New York Times,” “The Nation,” and “Salon,” and has appeared on many radio programs, including Britain’s premiere morning talk show, “Today Programme,” and many NPR programs, including “On Point,” "Morning Edition," and “Studio 360.” She is currently at work on a book about a Depression-era banking scandal in Colorado.