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
Pictures of You, 20 Years Later: A Goth Flashback
The Cure's "Pictures of You" came on last night, and instantly I was propelled back in time twenty years, to my senior year of high school. I remembered those late night drives, alone in my car, alone with The Cure, the sound of those keyboards, that jangly guitar, that bass, washing over everything, connecting me to something beyond those suburban streets.I remember my first trip to a goth club. It was the Roxy, just off Dupont Circle, in downtown DC, and Wednesday nights were the goth night....
The Myth of the Rom-Com-Romance (aka Don’t Touch My Spikes)
Those who know me (or, to be more accurate, those who have tried to get to know me) know that I describe myself as a porcupine. I am full of bristles, ready to spear the reckless and over-eager hand. I do not take well to intimacy. I do not do well with vulnerability. I do not share myself (or my emotions) easily. I unfold myself in careful partitions, preferably a well-starched inch at a time, slow to trust and even slower to need. I do not like intimacy. I do not like vulnerability. I do not...
The Very White (and Very Male) Face of Late Night Television
I had a couple of immediate reactions to this recent article in The Daily Beast: "With Arsenio Hall Out, Late Night Becomes All White and Male—and So What?"1. I didn't even know Arsenio Hall had a show, much less that people were even thinking about renewing it for a second season.2. Was that horrible photo of Chelsea Handler really necessary?3. More all-white-maleness? Sigh.To recap, last week news broke that Arsenio Hall’s late-night talk show had been cancelled, and Chelsea Handler’s talk...