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Dr. Stephen Duncombe is Professor of Media and Culture at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications at the Steinhardt School of New York University. He is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of six books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy; Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture; The Bobbed Haired Bandit: Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York; the Cultural Resistance Reader; White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race; and (Open) Utopia. Duncombe is also the creator of the Open Utopia, an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, and co-creator of Actipedia.org, a user-generated digital database of creative activism case studies. In 1998, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by the State University of New York and was presented with the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at NYU’s Gallatin school in 2012. Duncombe is a life-long political activist, co-founding a community based advocacy group in the Lower East Side of  Manhattan, which won an award for “Creative Activism” from the Abbie Hoffman Foundation, and working as an organizer for the NYC chapter of the international direct action group, Reclaim the Streets.  He is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, a research and training institute that helps activists to create more like artists and artists to strategize more like activists. 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.