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Department of Cinema & Media Arts

Sasha Crawford-Holland

Assistant Professor of Cinema & Media Arts

Education

  • 2024 Ph.D. Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago
    • Certificate in College Teaching 
  • 2018 M.A., Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California
  • 2015 B.A. (First Class Honours) Cultural Studies, McGill University

Specializations

  • Film and Media Theory
  • Digital Media
  • Environmental Humanities
  • Documentary Film and Activist Media
  • Social Justice and Technology

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. My research and teaching examine the relationships between media, violence, and social justice, with an emphasis on environmental issues. My current book project, The Temperature Complex: How Media Make Sense of Oppressive Heat, investigates how media technologies and cultural forms arrange people’s senses of thermal perception. I analyze a wide range of media that schematize temperature—from television broadcasts to weather apps to climate models—and I argue that, in configuring thermal perception, they distribute uneven vulnerabilities to heat’s precipitous rise. Additional research projects are concerned with documentary cultures, state violence, settler colonialism, racial politics, and activist media.

 

My research is published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, the London Review of International Law, JumpCut, Film History, Television & New Media, Synoptique, and the collection Indigenous Media Arts in Canada. With Patrick Brian Smith and LaCharles Ward, I edited the World Records volume “Just Evidence,” which explores media’s role in struggles toward accountability and abolition. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, I received my PhD in Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago. My research has received awards from Screen, Domitor, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and has been supported by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, the University of Chicago’s Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative, USC Annenberg, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 

I believe that research should be for everyone and, to that end, have worked on public programs with NPR’s Throughline, the Toronto International Film Festival, Open City Documentary Festival, the USC Shoah Foundation, the Deutsche Kinemathek, and the University of Chicago’s Media, Arts, Data, and Design Center, where I programmed the exhibition “Indigenous Futurisms in VR.”

Publications

Peer-Reviewed Articles 

2025

  • “Law’s Capture of Human Rights-Focused Open-Source Investigation,” With Patrick Brian Smith and Andrew Williams,  London Review of International Law 13.1: 93-113.

2024

2023

2021

  • “The Birth of a Nation in Canada: Black Protest and White Denialism across Canada’s Color Lines,” Film History 32.4 (Winter 2021): 1-32

2019

  • “Virtual Healing: Militarizing the Psyche in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy,” Television & New Media 20.1 (2019): 56-71 

2018

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapter

2023

  • “Knowledge as Territory: A Note to the Settler Academy” and “‘Making Things Our [Digital] Own’: Lessons on Time and Sovereignty from Indigenous Computational Art,” co-authored with Lindsay LeBlanc, Indigenous Media Arts in Canada: Making, Caring, Sharing, edited by Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2023)

Essays

2025

  • “The End of Archaeology as We Know It,” With Kisha Supernant, World Records 9 (2025)
  • “Just Evidence,” With Patrick Brian Smith and LaCharles Ward, World Records 9 (2025)

2023

2022

2020

  • “The Politics of Participation in Documentary,” American Quarterly 72.4 (December 2020): 1021-1032.

Review

2022

  • “Sasha Crawford-Holland reviews The People Are Not an Image,” Critical Inquiry 48.4 (2022): 805-806.