On May 14th at Baruch College, in conjunction with Mishkin Gallery’s current exhibition Visible Communication, Professor Griffiths presented a lecture on the rich visual culture of the medieval period and dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, opening up intellectual thought lines across distinct eras to remind us that our contemporary digital landscape (and cinema before that) are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing.

Professor Griffiths gave a talk on her latest book, Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film, at the University at Albany on April 24th. The lecture was about The Explorers Club in New York City, a vibrant home for all things related to exploration that is still active in sponsoring and promoting scientific research, drawing upon archival research Professor Griffiths conducted at the Explorers Club that was funded by a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship

In May, Griffiths delivered the Honors Convocation address at Kean University in New Jersey. Griffiths talked about her long fascination with silent film and visual culture and how to harness the power of images for good rather than as weaponized tools of shame or hate. Drawing upon her own academic journey, Griffiths discussed the idea of amateur film as cultural memory and news ways of approaching and re-imagining the archive from an Indigenous perspective

Griffiths delivered a lecture which explored how Sámi artists, Indigenous peoples from the Sápmi region of northern Scandinavia and Russia, utilize extended reality (XR) video to exploit the reconstructive, place-making potency of 360-degree large-format immersive video. Focusing on an immersive video shown at the Sámi Pavilion at 59th Biennale de Venezia in 2022, where in a historic first, the Nordic Pavilion became an exhibition space dedicated to Sámi artworks, Griffiths placed it in conversation with much earlier Renaissance cartographic practices that represent the Sámi in visually stunning large-format maps, arguing that their presence in the landscape across centuries of visual representation might be considered a form of suppressed geography of cultural and territorial rights affirming the Sámi’s lifeways and sense of self-determination.

Alison Griffiths takes us on a journey through the film archive to explore the vibrant cultural history and resilience of Sámi peoples in some of the earliest films made in the Sápmi region. How do archival films inscribe the landscape, cultural heritage, and memory of Sámi peoples whose ancestral roots extend deep into recorded time? And how can contemporary works made by Sámi artists reimagine this archival history by incorporating photographs and films that evoke themes of belonging and connectedness? Finally, what responsibilities do archives have as caretakers of Indigenous audiovisual heritage, and what best practices are there for repatriating films to their homelands?

“Griffiths gave a lecture at Utrecht University in October 2022 that explored the use of lantern slides as evidentiary media.  She explored the concept of wonder (and its close cousin curiositas) as a way of grappling with the lantern slide’s dialectical indebtedness to veritas (truth) and imaginari (the imagination), as well as the idea of contra-vignetting, a literal and metaphorical shifting away from the center of an image as the locus of meaning.  Griffiths grounded these ideas in a case study examination of the use of lantern slides at the Explorers Club in New York City, a vibrant “maker space” where the latest technology and images of adventure were projected onto the screen.”

Griffiths presented her work on cartography, immersion, and virtual reality at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK in July, part of a broader research project on a media imaginary in medieval visual works. An earlier version of this research appears in the “In Focus” section of the most recent issue of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies entitled “Humanitarian Immersion” vol. 61, no. 3 (Spring 2022), available here. Griffiths was on a panel entitled “Design at the Border: Liminality in Medieval and Postmodern Contexts,” co-moderated by Laura Hollengreen, University of Arizona and Rebecca Rouse, Institutionen för Informationsteknologi Högskolan i Skövde, Denmark.

A Different Story: Cinema in the Women’s Reformatory

Griffiths spoke online at the Michigan State University Broad Museum, in conjunction with a fall 2021 exhibit on incarceration, October, 15, 2021.