Stephen Duncombe ’88

Stephen Duncombe ’88 is Research Director and Co-Founder of Center for Artistic Activism and a professor of media and culture at New York University’s Gallatin School.

Duncombe’s interests lie in media and cultural studies.

He teaches and writes on the history of mass and alternative media and the intersection of culture and politics.

He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (The New Press, 2007) and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture (Verso, 1997) co-author, along with Andrew Mattson, of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York (New York University Press, 2006), editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader (Verso, 2002), co-editor, along with Maxwell Tremblay, of White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race (Verso, 2011), and writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications.

Duncombe is also the creator of Open Utopia, an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.

The Center for Artistic Activism, whose director and co-founder is Steve Lambert, associate professor of new media, is a research and training institute that helps activists to create more like artists and artists to strategize more like activists. Professor ofHis scholarly and activist work has been supported by, among others, the Open Society and Fulbright foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.

Duncombe is currently writing a book on the effect and affect of artistic activism, and his scholarly and activist work has been supported by, among others, the Open Society and Fulbright foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.