Professor Alison Griffiths has won a Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Scholar Award to Norway, one of the Fulbright’s Distinguished Chair programs. She will be based at the National Library of Norway in Oslo with a secondary affiliation at the UiT The Arctic University in Tromsø.
“My project examines amateur films of Sámi peoples 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,” she said. “I will also be reconnecting the films to the Sámi community and in consultation with stakeholders at the Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT, exploring their significance and legacy.”
Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor in Baruch Weissman’s Department of Communication Studies, where she teaches film and media studies. She also teaches in the theatre doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center. An internationally recognized scholar of film, media and visual studies, her research crosses the fields of film studies, 19th century visual culture, and medieval visual studies and examines cinema’s relationship to, and experience in, non-traditional spaces of media consumption.
In addition to the Fulbright, Griffiths is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Meyer Fellowship from the Huntington Library, and a Project Development grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her research has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Eugene Lang Foundation, The Waterhouse Family Institute, and PSC-CUNY. Griffiths received a Felix Gross Award for outstanding research by a CUNY junior faculty member and has twice won Baruch College’s Presidential Distinguished Scholarship Award.
Griffiths is the author of three monographs and over 38 journal articles and book chapters. Her books include the multiple award-winning Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture; Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View; and Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prisons in Early Twentieth Century American. She has just finished her latest book, Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film, under contract with Columbia University Press and is at work on a new project about travel, Indigenous history, and memory.
Watch a video interview with her that was taped when she received the Guggenheim.
