Gold Crown Press

Harriet Bernard-Levy is the great granddaughter of renowned theorist Walter Benjamin. She graduated from the Sorbonne in 1995 with a doctorate in the theory of Western culture and late capitalist-poststructuralist critique. Since then, she has divided her time between leisure, lecturing, and in-depth immersion-style reporting on various exotic subcultures. Her first book, "Tina Turner and the Thunderdome of Dissent," was a work of pure theory, laying a framework of feminist dissent on the imaginative landscape of popular culture. It has since become a canonical text of Madonna Studies, Bikini Theory and other pop-feminist subfields of cultural studies. For her second book, "Behold the Dancing Bear," Dr. Bernard-Levy left the laboratory for the field. She spent four years following the Grateful Dead, integrating herself into the hippie culture and observing the non-monetary exchanges of drugs, food and concert tickets that sustain it. "Virus," a genealogical examination of the late 20th century practice of "selling out," and its origins in Philadelphia, is her third book. She has recently taken up bicycle polo and graffiti.