Hello, I’m Hunter Vaughan and apparently I have a website - thanks for visiting! I am a environmental media scholar and cultural historian focusing on the relationship between new media technologies, social justice, & the environment.

In addition to being Senior Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, Cambridge University Centre for research in the arts, social sciences, and humanities (CRASSH), I am:

• AUTHOR of Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: the Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2019), an environmental counter-narrative to Hollywood history looking at the resource use and ecosystem disruptions behind the silver screen’s masterpieces, focusing on the environmental and global justice ramifications of the digital turn. I have given book talks at Books & Books (Coral Gables FL), the Boston Film and Media Speaker Series (Wellesley College), and the Boulder Book Store (Boulder, CO)

  Check out a review and interview/video essay on Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret

  Check out an interview on the book for the Imagine Otherwise podcast

• co-PRINCIPLE INVESTIGATOR (w/ Nicole Starosielski, Anne Pasek, and Angeli Sugadev) on Sustainable Subsea Networks grant project to study and support environmental sustainability in the subsea telecommunication cable network. Listen to recent NPR coverage here

• co-PRINCIPLE INVESTIGATOR (w/ Pietari Kääpä ) on an international AHRC grant to build a Global Green Media Network to facilitate and support environmentally responsible film and media production initiatives around the world

• EDITOR-IN-CHIEF and co-FOUNDER (w/ Meryl Shriver-Rice) of the Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Books), an interdisciplinary scholarly platform bridging work in environmental studies, social justice, and science communication through the prism of screen media

• Committee Member, British Standards Institute “Sustainable Robotics Guide”

My teaching and research explore overlapping spaces betwixt environmental media studies, environmental studies, ecocinema, social movements, and social science approaches to cultural heritage - for which I have been featured on stories at NPR and the BBC. Current collaborative projects on media infrastructures, production cultures, social justice, and environmental communication include:

• collaboration with the leading scholars of digital media infrastructures and subsea cable industry professionals to enhance environmental sustainability and social equity in the Internet’s growing backbone

• studies of environmental values and political economy in the localized development of green production practices in Miami and the Caribbean. Check out my most recent publication, in Environmental Values: “A Green Intervention in Media Production Culture Studies: Environmental Values, Political Economy and Mobile Production”

• a study of the role of digital media and screen technologies (such as 3-D projections, interactive media, and augmented reality apps) in Italian heritage institutions, museums, and archaeological sites - see recent publication w/ Meryl Shriver-Rice: “Digital Heritage and the Anthropocene”

• reception studies of short-form sea-level rise video messaging in South Florida - see here for most recent co-authored publication in Environmental Communication

For more on my research, publications, and teaching, use the drop down menu in the upper left (or lower left if using mobile).