Sasha Crawford-Holland

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts

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.”