
About Dahlia
DAHLIA SCHWEITZER is a pop culture critic, writer, and professor. Described by Vogue as “sexy, rebellious, and cool,” Schweitzer writes about film, television, music, gender, identity, and everything in between. She studied at Wesleyan University, lived and worked in New York City and Berlin, and completed her MA and PhD at the Art Center College of Design and UCLA. She is currently chair of the Film and Media department at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
In addition to her books, Dahlia has essays in publications including Cinema Journal, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Hyperallergic, Jump Cut, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The Journal of Popular Culture. She has also released several albums of electronic music, including Plastique and Original Pickup.

Professor
As a professor of film and media studies, Dahlia exposes her students to a variety of theoretical approaches and cinematic techniques, asking them to approach both with analytical inquisitiveness. Her aim is to pass her own curiosity on to her students, encouraging them to think across their classes and experiences to create intellectual connections between course materials and the world in which they live. She strives to remind her students that the loudest voice is not necessarily correct, and in so doing, helps them find their own.

Media Critic
Declared “one of the world’s leading analysts of popular culture” by renowned author Toby Miller, Dahlia writes about film, television, music, gender, identity, and everything in between. Her work can be found across mainstream, academic, and emergent channels in both long and short form. Repeatedly drawn to popular culture, Dahlia loves to analyze and unpack cultural artifacts in order to explore how they reflect social and historical issues, as well as looking at how they reinforce or interrogate common cultural assumptions.

Author
Dahlia has written numerous books exploring aspects of film and television. Regardless of the topic—serial killers, private detectives, or even zombies—all of her writing engages directly with questions of self versus other, private versus public space, examining depictions of gender, identity, and race. She traces how these depictions evolve and examines what they mean about our changing world. In her latest project, Dahlia explores the ways haunted homes have become a venue for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse.
Blog
Why Your Hipster T-Shirt Doesn’t Make You a Feminist
Mark Ruffalo's delightful response to the "I Am Not a Feminist" phenomenon, in which he castigates the current trend of women (and maybe also men?) to distance themselves from the feminist label (“You’re insulting every woman who was forcibly restrained in a jail cell with a feeding tube down her throat for your right to vote, less than 100 years ago"; “You’re undermining every woman who fought to make marital rape a crime [it was legal until 1993]"; “You’re spitting...
Marilyn Monroe: Artist and Auteur
In honor of Marilyn's birthday (and she is always Marilyn to us, never Miss Monroe), an essay from my archives: Six weeks before she died, Marilyn Monroe did a photo shoot with Bert Stern for Vogue magazine. These photos show a Monroe more natural, more exposed than ever before. Instead of the artificially perfect and rigid glamour more suited to a star of her status, her hair is casually tousled, and her lips often open—some say to hide a determined chin, others that it was a...
All Fury, No Soul: Why Mad Max Left Me Empty and Disappointed
Despite its glowing reviews, both by my friends and esteemed critics, Mad Max: Fury Road left me mystified and empty. What did I just see that they didn't? What did they see that I missed? Because what I just saw was a dumbed-down spectacle of explosion and testosterone guaranteed to thrill any boy under sixteen...but everyone else? A 98% on Rotten Tomatoes? I'm at a loss. Have our standards really sunk so low? Let me break it down for you: Furiosa (Charlize Theron) drives some...