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
I’m Back, Bitches — And I’m Bossy
I'll confess I'm a little late to the party on this one, but I had to finish three term papers and two courses and attend a conference, so accept my apologies. But better late than never, right? It's been a couple weeks since Sheryl Sandberg launched her campaign to ban the word "bossy." Two things: 1. good luck 2. why? Banning a word reeks of the worst kind of avoidance and suppression. That whole "let's sweep it under the carpet and pretend it doesn't exist" thing. But you know what? It does...
It Takes Two (to Watch TV)
I recently received this letter from one of my readers: I haven't had much success with men and, the majority of the time, I thought it was them. Granted, there were several men who were legitimate assholes that deserved to be dismissed. However, there were definitely some men that had me wondering why they lost interest so abruptly when I thought everything was going along smoothly. Then it dawned on me last night when I had my latest 'crash and burn' conversation with a man that I've been...
Love is a Peculiar Thing
Love is a peculiar thing. So many people want it, so many people crave it, so many write about it and sing about it and commodify it—and yet it remains elusive, hard to find while also seemingly everywhere. There is the love between mother and child, between pet and owner, between partners, between friends. Each type of love is different, and even within its differences, there are constant mutations and evolutions. Love on Monday may be different than love on Tuesday. Love may vanish only to...