Associate Professor
About
Hollis Griffin teaches and researches the cultural politics of television, the internet, and social media, particularly as they intersect with affect, sexuality, and questions of space/place. His book, Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age (Indiana, 2017), was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2017 by Choice, the publication of the American Library Association. In it, he demonstrates how LGBTQ+ bars and clubs in U.S. urban centers provide a historical precedent for the courtship of LGBTQ+ consumers by the cultural industries in the context of digital media production, distribution, and reception.
Hollis's next single-author book project, Media and the Metropolis: New York City and the Technologies of Urban Living, frames the urban center as an ensemble of cultural technologies that administer populations by coordinating movement, managing density, and marking boundaries. The case studies include the street grid, the subway, skyscrapers, apartments, and bridges and tunnels. By examining mediated encounters with New York City in cinema, television, and online media, he considers the hopes and fears that U.S. national culture maps onto the urban center, as well as the fantasies of autonomy, collectivity, and transcendence it is used to conjure. Drawing on archival research, field observations, and the close reading of texts from popular culture, his objects of analysis include musicals, selfies, sitcoms, public relations campaigns, TikTok dance challenges, and crime programs.
He has also published research in New Media & Society, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Popular Communication, Television & New Media, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Popular Film and Television and the anthologies Ryan Murphy’s Queer America (Routledge, 2022), The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication (Routledge, 2019), and A Companion to Reality Television (Wiley, 2014). Hollis also edited Television Studies in Queer Times (Routledge, 2023), a collection of essays that consider LGBTQ+ television programming in the context of distribution via streaming platforms.
Finally, he is also active in the field of media studies, having served on the editorial boards of Television & New Media; Journal of Cinema and Media Studies; Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies; Communication, Culture, and Critique; Film Criticism; and Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture. He was elected to a three-year term on the Board of Directors for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies from 2018 to 2021; he served as secretary from 2019 to 2021.
Recent and forthcoming publications:
"Taj Mahal in the Toilet: Constructing Authenticity on Times Square," forthcoming in Critical Studies in Television
"A Great Place: Apartments, New York City, & the Sitcom." Television and New Media 27.3 (2025): 260-278. https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764251396089
"Fame! Fortune! Glamour!: John Waters Remembers Midcentury TV," ReFocus: The Films of John Waters. Michelle Moore and Brian Brems, Eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025. 184-199.
"Doing Bad Film History: Lessons on Archive and Method from John Waters," The Routledge Companion to American Film History. Pam Wojcik and Paula Massood, Eds. New York: Routledge, 2025. 53-63.
"Sexual Diversity and Streaming Television: Toward a Platform Studies Approach to Analyzing LGBTQ+ TV." Convergence 30.4 (August 2024): 1459-1473. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565241265508
“When Mass Culture Meets High Culture: Reality Television and Big Data at the Art Museum.” Communication, Culture and Critique 17.1 (March 2024): 40-47.
Television Studies in Queer Times. Ed. New York: Routledge, 2023.
"The Politics of Merely Following: Witnessing AIDS on Instagram." New Media & Society 24.1 (2022): 90-104.
"It’s a Sin: AIDS as Incipient Crisis." European Journal of Cultural Studies (2022): 115-121.
“I Always Knew I Wasn’t Gonna Be Long on this Earth: Pose and the AIDS Crisis,” Ryan Murphy’s Queer America. Brenda R. Weber and David Greven, Eds. New York: Routledge, 2022. 185-196.
"Living Through It: Anger, Laughter, and Internet Memes in Dark Times." International Journal of Cultural Studies 24.3 (2021): 381-397.
