News
2025
Nomadic Cinema Book Launch
On September 18th , Baruch College’s Newman Library was the setting for the launch of Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film, published by Columbia University Press. Colleagues, friends, and family gathered to celebrate the latest addition to Griffith’s oeuvre.
Communication Studies Department Chair Eric Gander welcomed guests as well as Interim Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences Jennifer Mangels, who introduced Alison Griffiths.
Two guest speakers offered unique takes on Nomadic Cinema’s far-reaching scope and innovative contribution to decolonial media studies, the first scholarly book dedicated to the expedition film, and that takes the reader on an incredible journey around the world, from the American Southwest to Borneo and Nepal.
Media Alex Juhasz
Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Alex Juhasz (Brooklyn College) captivated the audiences with her erudite and impassioned extolling of why everyone should read the book.
Nomadic Cinema
Kean College Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and former dean of the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at Baruch, David S. Birdsell, followed Juhasz with an equally rousing and sophisticated grasp of the book’s innovative use of maps and medieval visual studies to help us better grasp some of the progenitors of the expedition film.
Griffiths next introduced Belgian filmmaker Stéphanie L.V. Sassen who made the video teaser for the book, available here, a fantastic visual taste of some of the extraordinary films and images used in the book, before beginning her own presentation on her inspiration for writing it and why it matters in this political and cultural climate.
Musician and educator Tiv Hay-Rubin rounded off the evening by performing on her banjo, a mixture of Nepali themed songs in honor of the sherpa peoples who gave their lives and supported the numerous 1920s attempts on Mount Everest explored in Nomadic Cinema, and original works from her recently released EP.
CUP Book Launch Party
On April 4 at the Emerald Bar and Grill, during the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Professor Griffiths, along with Prof Rob King of Columbia University, and Brian Jacobson of the California Institute of Technology, celebrated the publication of their three new books from Columbia University Press’ Film and Culture series: Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film, Man of Taste, the Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger, and The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms.
Nomadic Cinema featured in 2025 Columbia University Press Spring Catalogue
Release of Nomadic Cinema
Professor Griffith’s fourth book with Columbia University Press was released in April 2025. Nomadic Cinema is a groundbreaking history of expedition films from the 20th century, analyzing them as visual records of colonialism that also offer new possibilities for recognizing Indigenous histories. It considers the individuals and institutions—including the American Museum of Natural History — responsible for creating the films, the spectators who sought them out, and the Indigenous intermediaries whose roles white explorers minimized.
2024
Grant received for new research project on Welsh coal mining disasters
Alison Griffith’s new research project explores film and photographic coverage of mining disasters in South Wales between 1877-1926, events that occurred with shocking regularity due to the inherent dangers of fossil fuel extraction. Making sense of coal mining disasters as seen unseen events and indices of culturally specific communities – their regularity contributed to the rise of the postcard industry in the UK, disaster tourism, and readership of the Illustrated London News – requires an epistemology that reads loss in both micro and macro terms. Drawing upon archival research conducted in South Wales in summer 2024 at the Glamorgan Archive and multiple heritage sites, the project examines the visual culture of mining disasters, framing the material in the context of mining’s re-imaging within the heritage industry.
2022
Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Scholar Award to Norway
As the Fulbright Arctic Chair, Dr. Griffiths will be based at the National Library of Norway in Oslo with a secondary affiliation at the UiT, The Arctic University in Tromsø, where she will examine amateur films of Indigenous Sámi people made between 1907-1960 within a broader historical context of visual representations of the Arctic, including cartographic materials in the world famous Ginsberg Map Collection at the National Library.
2021
CUNY Research Foundation Enhanced Award Grant
Granted for book project in progress: New Worlds From the Margins: Travel, Identity, and Vernacular Media. Archival research on amateur film featuring Indigenous Australians at the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, Australia.
2020
CUNY Distinguished Professor
Research Grant, The Waterhouse Family Institute for the Study of Communication and Society, Villanova University
Awarded for “Collective Memory and Visual Communication: The Archival Legacy of the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, Gallup, New Mexico.”
WFI Awards Page
2019
Mayer Fellowship, Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Awarded for “Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film.” Huntington fellowship link
2018
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
Awarded for “Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film.”
Guggenheim website
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Project Development Grant
Awarded for “Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film.”
ACLS grantees
New Book Project: Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film
Nomadic Cinema is the first monograph to examine the expedition film, focusing on films shot in Borneo, Central Asia, Tibet, Polynesia, and the American Southwest during the so-called “great age” of exploration. Grounded in archival research and drawing upon the fields of cultural geography, postcolonialism, and environmental media studies, Nomadic Cinema constructs an intellectual history of expedition filmmaking that views it as inexorably shaped, haunted if you will, by the twin specters of colonialism and adventure. The book also contextualizes expedition filmmaking within the longue durée of pre-modern travel writing and medieval theories of the world as spatialized knowledge, as well as new technologies of exploration such as VR and augmented reality.
2016
Carcerial Fantasies Book Signing
On September 8th, 2016 at Baruch College’s Performing Arts Center, colleagues, friends and family were greeted by author and professor Alison Griffiths at the book signing for her latest work, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (Columbia University Press, 2016)
Carceral Fantasies explores the little-known history of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Opening remarks were made by Dr. Aldemaro Romero Jr., the newly appointed Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and David Birdsell, Dean of the Baruch College School of Public and International Affairs. Baruch College President Mitchel Wallerstein was in attendance as well as many colleagues, family, and friends of the author.
Alison Griffiths 