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.
Books
Cindy Sherman’s
Office Killer
Going
Viral
L.A.
Private Eyes
Haunted
Homes
Blog
Why National Coming Out Day is Really No Big Deal
For the last few days, I've been telling myself that I should write something about National Coming Out Day, which is, after all, today. I figured I should write something personal and timely and maybe a little emotional. After all, it is National Coming Out Day -- and doesn't a day like that deserve a few key words? But after several attempts at brainstorming, I realized that I've got nothing. I've got nothing to say about a day dedicated to coming out. Why is that? Because there's something...
What’s Really Missing in Gone Girl
[WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW IF YOU HAVE NOT READ OR SEEN GONE GIRL.] Judith Butler may have famously said that gender is performed, but what Gone Girl tackles so emphatically is that, these days, almost everything is performed, but most especially and most oppressively, femininity. It is not merely that modern day women are expected to look good, but that they are expected to be cupcake-baking, soccer-game-cheering mothers while also being suit-wearing, boardroom-leading businesswomen. Women are...
No, But Are You REALLY Gay?
In what would otherwise be a charming love story, Lauren Morelli, one of the writers from the TV show Orange is the New Black, fell in love with one of the stars of the show, Samira Wiley. One of the reasons why the situation is not exactly perfect is that Lauren had been married, that Lauren had considered herself straight. Of course, these things happen. Marriages end all the time. People unexpectedly (and sometimes inconveniently) fall in love. But the backlash here is interesting. One of...