Though his scholarship focused significantly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s on the politics of postmodernism, his more recent work explores the possibilities and limitations of alternative and emergent formations of modernity.

Born on December 3, 1947, and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Grossberg went to Stuyvesant High School.

In 1968 he graduated summa cum laude in history and philosophy from the University of Rochester, where he studied with Hayden White.

Afterwards, he trained under Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England.

After two years of traveling through Europe with Les Treteaux Libres, a French-speaking theater company, Grossberg returned to the United States for doctoral studies in communication research (with James W. Carey) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.