Hunter Vaughan
Assistant Professor, School of Film, Television, and Media Arts
Dr. Hunter Vaughan is an environmental media scholar and cultural historian focusing on the relationship between media technologies, social justice, and the environment — in particular the environmental ramifications and social threats of digital growth.
He is the author of the monographs Where Film Meets Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2013) and Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: the Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2019), as well as numerous articles. He is editor of two book collections, The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (with Tom Conley, 2018) and Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Crisis (with Pietari Kaapa, 2022); and is founding editor (with Meryl Shriver-Rice) of the Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Press). His scholarship has been supported by the Internet Society Foundation and the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council, and featured nationally and locally on NPR, in the LA Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Dr. Vaughan is the director of the Emerson Environmental Media Initiative, aimed at building out campus-wide, local, and global projects around environmental media scholarship and production, sustainable film practice, and local community-based environmental justice storytelling.
Courses
- Approaches in Media Studies
- Topics in Media Studies
- Media Criticism and Theory
- Seminar in Media Arts Topics
- Master's Thesis
- Topics in Media Arts: Practice
Academic Work
- 2025, Environmental Media at the Intersections: Green Storytelling, Practice, and Justice on the Screen and Behind the Scenes, lead guest editor with M. Broner & M. Mhando, special issue, Environmental Communication
- 2025, “Film Education and the Environment,” lead guest editor with M. Hjort & P. Kääpä, special issue, Film Education Journal
- 2025, “Tech Dude vs Environmental Crisis: White Masculinity and Techno-fetishism in the Anglo-American Eco-documentary,” Environmental Communication
- 2025, “The walk, the talk, and the misdirection: Digitalization and the deflection of climate crisis in US and UK screen culture,” in Routledge Handbook on Climate Crisis Communication, A. Anderson & C. Howarth (Eds.)
- 2025, “Green Data Capitalism and its Rural Extractions,” with M. Wiessner, A. Pasek & N. Starosielski, in Media Rurality, P. Brodie & D. Barney (Eds.), Duke University Press
- 2023, “Sustainable Digitalization in the Screen Sector and the Next Step for Ecocriticism,” Film Forum 2022: The (Un)bearable Lightness of Media 61-70
- 2023, “ICT Environmentalism and the Sustainability Language-Game,” with A. Pasek, N. Silcox & N. Starosielski, Journal of Language and Politics
- 2023, “Documenting the Endangered North Atlantic Right Whale: Policies, Conservation Efforts, and Stakeholders Depicted in Entangled and Last of the Right Whales,” with M. Reamer & M. Shriver-Rice, Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy, 26:4: 281-306
- 2023, “Footprinting the Network: Subsea Cables and the Challenges of Environmental Assessment of Internet Infrastructure,” with N. Starosielski, A. Pasek & N. Silcox, Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies, Routledge Press
- 2022, Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Crisis: Towards a Greener Screen, with P. Kääpä (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan
- 2019, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies, Columbia University Press
- 2018, The Screen Theory Handbook, with T. Conley (Eds.), Anthem Press
