Biography
Dr. Colbey Emmerson Reid is Professor of Fashion Studies and the Director of the School of Fashion at Columbia College Chicago. She specializes in the theory of style and its impact on consumption, cognition, technological adoption, domesticity, and more. She has published Design, Mediation and the Posthuman (2014); was a contributor to Emerging Genres in New Media Environments (2016); and has won awards in recognition of her articles on "statistical aesthetics" (2009) and "Mina Loy's Design Flaws" (2011). Other published work addresses the impact of tile and textile pattern designs on perceptions of disability, the religious history of accessories and clothing in American cocktail culture, the intellectual history of glamour, and the impact of brand secrets on the development of taste micro-collectives. Her most recent book, Designing the Domestic Posthuman (Bloomsbury 2024, with Dennis M. Weiss), studied what Pauline Brown has called "the other A.I: aesthetic intelligence," by excavating the technicity of overlooked domestic artifacts like clothes, pets, and toilets and thereby defined an alternative pathway for technological futures and the posthuman. Current interests include: Kafka's "beauty management" regimen; biphilic fashion; and the question of how to define a "human style" at the level of species vs. individuals and culture. Reid is also the founder of Columbia College's Fashion Lab, and has directed over 50 academic/industry research partnership projects for companies like Cotton Incorporated, Cintas, United Airlines, and many others; she won an award for Outstanding Extension and Engagement Service in 2016 for work of this kind. Reid earned her BA at the University of Florida (1995) and both the MA and PhD the University of Washington (2003). She has also completed post-doctoral coursework and certifications at Cornell University (2005), Duke University (2017), and the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park (2004).
Instructional Areas
Fashion Studies
Creative Practice and Research Interests
consumer culture, design theory, brand aesthetics, materials neuroscience, the diffusion of innovations, beauty management, the philosophy of technology, posthumanism
Degrees
B.A., English literature; French literature University of Florida 1995
M.A., English literature University of Washington 1997
Ph.D., English literature University of Washington 2003