Rate My Professor Alison Griffiths

Alison Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York (CUNY), specializing in film and media studies within the Communications field, and a member of the doctoral faculty in Theater at the CUNY Graduate Center. She earned a BA in Drama and English from the University of Leicester in 1986, an MA in Film and Media from the University of London in 1990, and a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1998. Joining Baruch College in 1998, she advanced to full professor and was appointed CUNY Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies in 2019, the university's highest faculty honor limited to 250 professors system-wide. Griffiths served as Interim Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences from 2015 to 2016 and as a visiting professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University in 2009. Her career includes international lectures across Europe, Latin America, Scandinavia, and North America, establishing her as an expert on the history of ethnographic film.

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.