Rhonda Garelick

Rhonda Garelick is the D.E. Hughes Jr. Distinguished Chair for English at SMU Meadows and an affiliate faculty member of the Division of Journalism. She writes and teaches in a wide range of fields including modernist and contemporary literature; European history; visual art; popular culture; fashion; style; politics; theater, dance, and performance; and women’s studies.

She is the author of three monographs: Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (Random House), a political and critical biography; Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton University Press), awarded Outstanding Title in the Humanities and Performing Arts by Choice; and Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press), winner of the Kayden Prize for Outstanding Manuscript in the Humanities. She has also edited collections on art, literature, and fashion, including Fabulous Harlequin: ORLAN and the Patchwork Self, contributed essays to museum catalogues in the United States and Europe, and written many book chapters and scholarly articles.

Garelick’s New York Times column “Face Forward,” is devoted to the intersection of fashion, media, style and politics. For five years, she wrote the “Reading the Signs” column for New York Magazine’s “The Cut.” Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, Salon, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and many other venues. She is interviewed frequently in the press and in documentary films, and is currently a writing consultant for Apple+ TV’s upcoming series, “The New Look,” about European fashion.