Rate My Professor Natalya Lusty

Natalya Lusty is Professor of Cultural Studies and an ARC Future Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, where she co-founded the Critical Fashion Studies research group. She previously served as Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Lusty's research spans twentieth-century cultural history, critical fashion studies, feminist history and theory, modernism, surrealism, and visual culture. Her ARC Future Fellowship project examines the department store as an institution for the transnational dissemination of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics, alongside innovative forms of creative and educational consumer experiences. Key research threads address the collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Elsa Schiaparelli in the context of New York department stores, and the department store's historical role in social responsibility and consumer education, connecting these to contemporary developments in ethical sourcing, corporate responsibility, and environmental sustainability in fashion.

Lusty has authored influential works including Surrealism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Ashgate, 2007; Routledge, 2016) and co-authored Dreams: A Cultural History with Helen Groth (Routledge, 2013). She edited Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), co-edited Modernism and Masculinity with Julian Murphet (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and co-edited Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images with Donna West Brett (Routledge, 2019). Prominent articles encompass "Modern slavery legislation and the limits of ethical fashion" (Cultural Studies, 2022), "Riot Grrrl Manifestos and Radical Vernacular Feminism" (Australian Feminist Studies, 2017), and "Fashion futures and critical fashion studies" (Continuum, 2021). Through these contributions, Lusty's scholarship bridges cultural and fashion studies, illuminating intersections of aesthetics, politics, consumption, inequality, and sustainability, and advancing interdisciplinary understandings of modernism's enduring impact on contemporary vernacular practices.