Steven W. Thrasher, PhD holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ+ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. His writing has been widely published by Scientific American, The New York Times, Nation, The Atlantic, The Journal of American History, BuzzFeed News, Esquire and New York magazine. In 2019,Outmagazine named him one of the 100 most influential and impactful people of the year and in 2020, the Ford Foundation awarded him a grant for Creativity and Free Expression. An alumnus of media jobs with Saturday Night Live, the HBO film the Laramie Project and the NPR Story Corps project, Dr. Thrasher has been a staff writer for the Village Voice and a columnist for the Guardian. He holds a PhD in American Studies and lives in Chicago, New York and in motels at the end of runways. The Viral Under class is his first book. Twitter:@thrasherxy
