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
History and theory of film and media; visual culture; environmental studies; race and settler colonialism; theories of power and violence; digital media cultures; science and technology studies; documentary film and nonfiction media.
Biography
I’m a media scholar and assistant professor of cinema and media arts and communication studies at Vanderbilt University.
My research and teaching examine the relationship between media technologies, violence, and social justice, with an emphasis on environmental issues. My current project, The Temperature Complex: Epistemic Media and the Governance of Perception, explores how media make sense of heat. I analyze a wide range of technologies that schematize temperature-from surveillance systems to weather apps to digital models-and investigate how they distribute vulnerability to our heating climate. Additional research projects are concerned with contemporary documentary cultures, state violence, settler colonialism, and activist media.
My scholarly work is published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, JumpCut, Film History, Television & New Media, Synoptique, American Quarterly, and the collection Indigenous Media Arts in Canada. Prior to joining Vanderbilt, I received my Ph.D. 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, 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, 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
2024
- “A Sense of Security: The Visual Politics of COVID Thermography,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 64.5 (forthcoming)
2023
- “Teaching (Anti-)Police Media,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 62 (Winter 2023-2024)
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
- “Humanitarian VR Documentary and its Cinematic Myths,” Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 7.1 (2018): 19-31
Peer-Reviewed Book Chapter
2023
- “‘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
2023
- “Documentary and/as Surveillance,” Docalogue
- “Knowledge as Territory: A Note to the Settler Academy,” 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)
2022
- “Forensics,” co-authored with Patrick Brian Smith, The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies—A Glossary of Lab Techniques, edited by Darren Wershler, Lori Emerson, and Jussi Parikka (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 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.