The Department of Communication Studies
Alison Griffiths 
Alison Griffiths is the author of the award-winning book Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture (Columbia University Press, 2002), which won the Sixteenth Annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award in 1999; the Katherine S. Kovacs Award for the best published book in film and media studies in 2003; and honorable mention for the Krazna Krausz Moving Image Book Award in 2004. Professor Griffiths has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards: Distinguished Scholarship at Baruch College (2003); NEH Summer Stipend (2003); two Eugene Lang Junior Faculty Fellowship at Baruch College (1999 and 2002); the Felix Gross Award for outstanding research by a CUNY junior faculty member (2002); and a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (1998).
Her research has appeared in such journals as Cinema Journal, Screen, Film History, Wide Angle, Continuum, Visual Anthropology Review, Early Popular Visual Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and in numerous anthologies on early cinema and media audiences. Her second book on the history of spectacle in old and new media contexts entitled Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema and the History of the Immersive View is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Her research includes visual studies, documentary film and television, early cinema, new media, television audiences, and a new book project on the ethics of image making entitled Their Lives Through Our Eyes: The Ethics of Images on the Edge. Professor Griffiths is a member of the doctoral faculty in Theater at the CUNY Graduate Center where she teaches on a regular basis.
Course taught at Baruch include: at the undergraduate level, COM 3060 Media Analysis and Criticism, COM 3067 American Television Programming, and COM 4101 Special Topics (The Ethics of Image Making); and at the graduate level, COM 9655 Corporate Advertising and Image Identity.
Recent Publications:
Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture (Columbia University Press, 2002)
"Playing at Being Indian: Spectatorship and the Early Western," Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall. 2001): 100-111
" 'We Partake as It Were of His Life': The Status of the Visual in Early Ethnographic Film," in John Fullerton, ed., Technologies of Moving Images (Sydney: John Libbey Press, forthcoming, 1999).
" 'To the World the World We Show': Early Travelogues as Filmed Ethnography," Film History, Vol. 11, No. 3 (forthcoming, September 1999).
Major entries on "Audiences" and "Ethnography" in Roberta Pearson and Philip Simpson, eds., Critical Dictionary of Film and Television (London: Routledge, forthcoming, 1999).
Co-authored with James Latham, "Film and Ethnic Identity in Harlem, 1896-1915," in Melvyn Stokes, ed., Hollywood and Its Spectators: The Reception of American Film, 1895-1995 (London: British Film Institute, 1999), pp. 45-60.
" 'Animated Geography': Moving Pictures, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Amusements," in John Fullerton, ed., Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema (Sydney: John Libbey Press, 1998), pp. 190-202.
" 'To Disappoint the Ravages of Time: Precinematic Ethnography at the American Museum of Natural History," in André Gaudreault, Claire Dupré la Tour, and Roberta Pearson, eds., Le cinéma au tournant du siècle/Cinema at the Turn of the Century (Lausanne: Editions Payot/Quebec: Nuit Blanche, 1998), pp. 108-21.
"Wales and Television," in Horace Newcomb, ed., The Encyclopedia of Television (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), pp. 1778-82.
"Knowledge and Visuality in Turn of the Century Anthropology: The Early Ethnographic Cinema of Alfred Cort Haddon and Walter Baldwin Spencer," Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 1996/97): 18-43.
" 'Journeys for Those Who Cannot Travel': Promenade Cinema and the Museum Life Group," Wide Angle, Vol. 18, No. 3 (July 1996): 53-84.
" 'A Moving Picture in Two Senses': Allegories of the Nation in 1950s Indian Melodrama," Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1996): 174-84.
"Science and Spectacle: Discourses of Authenticity in Early Ethnographic Film," in Elizabeth Bird, ed., Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 79-95.
"Ethnography and the Politics of Audience Research," in Peter I. Crawford and Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson, eds., Constructing the Viewer (Copenhagen: Intervention Press, 1996), pp. 47-65.
"National and Cultural Identity in a Welsh Language Soap Opera," in Robert Allen, ed., To Be Continued: Soap Operas Around the World (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 81-97.
"Ethnography and Popular Memory: Postmodern Configurations of Welsh Identities," Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1994): 307-26.
"Pobol y Cwm: National and Cultural Identity in a Welsh Language Soap Opera," in Phillip Drummond, Richard Paterson, and Janet Willis, eds., National Identity and Europe: The Television Revolution (London: British Film Institute, 1993), pp. 9-24.
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