Rhonda Garelick is the founding director of the Institute for Public Humanities and the Arts at Hofstra University, where she is also the John Cranford Adams Distinguished Professor of Literature. She writes about the intersection of aesthetics and politics. She is the author of four books, including  the forthcoming Why Fashion Matters, with Yale University Press; Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History (Random House, 2014); Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton University Press, 2007); and Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton University Press, 1998).

Garelick writes the “Face Forward” column for The New York Times, and is a former columnist for New York Magazine’s “The Cut.” She has also written for W Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Wall St. Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and other venues. She has served as a writing consultant for the Apple+ TV series “The New Look” and appeared in several documentary films. She has also worked extensively as an international corporate consultant in the fields of media, finance, journalism, fashion, and beauty.

Garelick is a Guggenheim fellow and has also received awards from the Getty Research Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Dedalus Foundation, the NEA, the NEH, the American Association of University Women, and the Whiting Foundation. She received her PhD and BA from Yale University in French and Comparative Literature, and is an ancienne pensionnaire étrangère of Paris’s Ecole Normale Supérieure.