Alice Echols

Alice Echols is Professor of History and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She has written four books that explore the culture and politics of the “long Sixties,” including Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin and Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Her forthcoming book explores an earlier period of U.S. history. Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking (The New Press), concerns a devastating Depression-era banking scandal and its connection to the cratering of the country’s building and loan industry. At the center of her narrative is her maternal grandfather, an ambitious building and loan operator in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Shortfall chronicles the fall-out from the industry's failure, examines how its history came to be forgotten, and the consequences that followed from that cultural forgetting. It stands as a cautionary tale about the seductions and dangers of unfettered capitalism. She lives in Los Angeles.