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Alison Griffiths
Born	Wales
Academic background
Alma mater	New York University
Academic work
Discipline	Cinema Studies
Institutions	Baruch College, CUNY Graduate Center
Website	https://alisongriffiths.org/

Alison Griffiths is an American professor at the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York, and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches film history, visual studies, and media theory. Her writing covers such interdisciplinary topics as the history of ethnographic film, medieval visual studies, and new media. She was named the CUNY Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies in 2019 and was given the Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Scholar Award to Norway in 2022.

Career

Griffiths received her Bachelors in Drama and English from the University of Leicester in 1986, her Masters in Film and Media from the University of London in 1990, and her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1998. Griffiths is now a distinguished professor at Baruch College, and has published over thirty five scholarly articles and book chapters as well as three books. The first, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (Columbia University Press, 2002), was described by Choice Magazine as a "significant contribution to knowledge about methods of recording and presenting visual culture of non-Western peoples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries." Her second book, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (Columbia University Press, 2008) described how media throughout the centuries, from medieval cathedrals to IMAX films, have created an immersive experience, and her most recent work, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) covered the relationship between prisons and their depiction in early cinema. In his review of Carceral Fantasies, Jon Lewis writes that "Griffiths has a fascinating story to tell, in which she argues that we can view execution films as a kind of attraction—and in doing so are led to ponder: what constitutes an attraction?"