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
Faux-Lesbians, Victoria’s Secret, and the Case of the Missing CEO
There has been quite a bit of cyber-ink spilled recently about the shameless new Shakira/Rihanna video and its faux-lesbian posturing. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3mP3mJDL2k&w=560&h=315] Regardless of whether or not faux-lesbians (or Shakira) are your thing, the video is just, well, disappointing. To make matters worse, Shakira made basically the same video with Beyonce a few years ago. It was far less sexy, far more artistic. So, to do the same thing over again, covering...
In Real Life, Images Are Larger Than They Appear
The sexual revolution, for better and for worse, has been superseded by fears of HPV and HIV. And thanks to technology, people have continued to disappear, sending out blips of communication through Twitter posts and Facebook status updates. In-person communication has become optional, replaced by e-mail, video chats, and conference calls. Modern living may pretend to bring us together, but it really just puts us inside condoms and computers. All the oversharing we do on online has created the...
Danger, Danger! Red Flags Ahead!
When you start dating someone, everyone always warns you about red flags. Watch out for the red flags, they say, in that condescendingly cautionary tone. So what are red flags? Red flags are those little things someone does that signal huge problems lurking just under the surface or behind that closet door. He is a bad tipper? He's going to be stingy with you. He makes you take your shoes off at the door? He's OCD. He won't spend the night? He's got intimacy issues. He won't hold your friend's...