Rate My Professor Alison Griffiths

Griffiths' research explores film history, visual studies, media theory, nineteenth-century visual culture, medieval visual studies, expedition films, media archaeology, and cinema's role in nontraditional spaces such as museums and prisons. She has authored four monographs published by Columbia University Press: Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (2002), recipient of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Best Dissertation Award (1999) and Katherine S. Kovacs Book Award (2003); Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (2008); Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (2016); and Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film (2025). With over 50 journal articles and book chapters in publications like Cinema Journal, Screen, Film History, and Visual Anthropology Review, her scholarship has profoundly influenced cinema studies, anthropology, and cultural history. Major awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Chair to Norway (2022), ACLS Project Development Grant (2018), NEH Summer Stipend (2003), and residencies at the Huntington Library (2019) and National Library of Norway (2023). Twice recipient of Baruch College’s Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Scholarship, Griffiths continues to shape academic discourse on visual media's cultural impacts.