Publications and Editorship
“In Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret, Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences. Bringing together environmental humanities, science communication, and social ethics, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret is a pathbreaking consideration of the film industry’s environmental impact. Vaughan examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how popular screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world. Emphasizing the materiality of media, Vaughan interweaves details of the hidden environmental consequences of specific filmmaking practices, from water use to server farms, within a larger critical portrait of social perceptions and valuations of the natural world.”
Click here to listen to an extended podcast interview about the book
The Journal of Environmental Media offers a scholarly platform to bridge work in environmental studies, identity and social justice, and science communication through the prism of screen media, focusing on the role of new and emerging digital media in our understanding and perception of the environment and related social issues.
The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory offers a unique and progressive survey of screen theory and how it can be applied to a range of moving-image texts and sociocultural contexts. Focusing on the ‘handbook’ angle, the book includes only original essays from two primary sources: established authors in the field and new scholars on the cutting edge of helping screen theory evolve for the twenty-first-century vistas of new media, social shifts and geopolitical change.
SELECT PUBLICATIONS
Books
Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Crisis: Towards a Greener Screen. (ed. with Pietari Kääpä, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret (Columbia University Press, 2019).
The Screen Theory Handbook (ed. with Tom Conley, Anthem Press, 2018).
Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (Columbia University Press, 2013).
Recent Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters
Shriver-Rice, Fernandez, Riopelle, Vaughan, and Johns. “Young Adults’ Reactions and Engagement With Short-Form Videos On Sea Level Rise”, Environmental Communication, Volume 16, Issue 1 (2022): 63-78.
Vaughan, H. “Media, Biomes, and Environmental Issues,” Routledge Handbook on Media Geographies, eds. Paul Adams and Barney Warf (London: Routledge, 2022).
Kääpä, P. and Vaughan, H. “From content to context (and back again): new industrial strategies for environmental sustainability in the media,” Cinema and the Public Good, eds. Mette Hjort and Ted Nannicelli New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2022).
Vaughan, H. and Johns, L. “Beyond Frame Analysis: Formal Analysis and Genre Typology in the Communication Study of Short-Form Environmental Video Messaging”, Journal of Environmental Media, 2.1, March 2021, 55-78.
Vaughan, H. “A Green Intervention in Media Production Culture Studies: Environmental Values, Political Economy, and Mobile Production,” Environmental Values, March 2020, 193-213.
Shriver-Rice, M. and Vaughan, H. “Digital Heritage and the Anthropocene: Media Use in Site-Specific Archaeological Installations in Lazio, Italy”, The Italianist 40.2 (2020), 165-79.
“What is Environmental Media?” (with M. Shriver-Rice), Journal of Environmental Media, 1.1 (2020), 3-13.
“Towards a Natural Screen Philosophy,” Philosophy and Film: Bridging a Divide, ed. Chris Rawls, Diana Neiva, and Steven Gouveia (London: Routledge, 2019)
“Towards a Screen Ecomaterialism: Film and Media Studies Beyond the Human,” The Screen Theory Handbook, eds. H. Vaughan and T. Conley (Anthem Press, 2018)
“500,000 Kilowatts of Stardust,” Sustainable Media, eds. Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker (New York: Routledge, 2016), 36-61.
Work in Progress
Mediated Heritage: A Global Look at Historical and Archaeological Sites with Interactive Media Installations (Edited Volume, with M. Shriver-Rice)
Eco/Eco: Environmental Approaches to Media Economics (multi-Authored Collaborative Book)
Seduction: Play, Desire, and Manipulation in the Moving-Image Culture Industry (Book)
“Communication, Application, and Execution: Contemporary Strategies for Green Film Production” (Article)
“Out of Stock: Unspooling the Environmental Ramifications of Film’s Materiality” (Invited Book Chapter)
“Melodrama of the Man Machine: Masculinity and Techno-fetishism in Digital Environmentalism” (Article)
The Limits of Imagination: Environmental Communication Framing and the Contradictions of Climate Fiction” (Article, with M. Shriver-Rice and A. Schmalstig)
“Generational Hero Construction as Meta-Communication Frame: the #Deification of Saint Greta By Numbers” (Article)