Sasha Crawford-Holland

Assistant Professor
Departments of Cinema and Media Arts and Communication Studies

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.”