Cynthia Chris joined CSI’s Department of Media Culture in 2004. She served as chair for two terms, 2018-24. In 2024-25, she served as a Faculty Leadership Development Fellow in the Office of Faculty Affairs at the CUNY Central Office.
Dr. Chris's current research interests include media history, media regulation, and critical animal studies. She is the author of The Indecent Screen: Regulating Television in the Twenty-First Century (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Watching Wildlife (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and she co-edited Media Authorship with David Gerstner (Routledge, 2013) and Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (NYU Press, 2007), with Sarah Banet-Weiser and Anthony Freitas. Her most recent books, Cuckoo (2024) and Crab (2021), are contributions to Reaktion's Animal series.
Dr. Chris has contributed to edited volumes including Animal Satire, The Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice,Keywords for Media Studies, Animal Life and the Moving Image, and Animals and the Human Imagination, as well as the journals Antennae, Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Communication Review, Television and New Media, and exposure. In 2019, Dr. Chris was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University in Canberra. Her most recent publications include reviews in Animal Studies Journal, Society & Animals, and Communication, Culture & Critique.
Dr. Chris and Dr. Matt Brim of CSI’s Department of English served as general co-editors of the journal WSQ, published by the Feminist Press at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2014-2016. Dr. Chris is an affiliated faculty member of the Film Studies Certificate Program and the Program in Women's and Gender Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
In Fall 2026, Dr. Chris teaches COM 315 Media Analysis and COM 425 Media Regulation.
Degrees
PhD, University of California, San Diego
MA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Monographs
Cuckoo (London: Reaktion, 2024). Animal Series.
Crab (London: Reaktion, 2021). Animal Series.
The Indecent Screen: Regulating Television in the Twenty-First Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019)
Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006)
Co-edited Volumes
Media Authorship (Routledge, 2013), with David A. Gerstner
Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (New York University Press, 2007), with Sarah Banet-Weiser and Anthony Freitas
Women, AIDS, and Activism by the ACT UP/NY Women and AIDS Book Group (Boston: South End Press and Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990)
Journal Articles
“Wounded: The Digital Animal and Death on Screen,” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 42 (Winter 2017): 104-117.
“Surveying Videoscapes: The Politics of Distribution in Tiered Visual Economies” (with Jason Simon), Art Journal 74, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 7-20.
“Queasy Questions About Media Violence,” Contexts 12, no. 3 (Summer 2013): 60-61.
“Censoring Purity,” Camera Obscura 79, v. 27, no. 1 (2012): 97-126.
“Can You Repeat That? Patterns of Media Ownership and the ‘Repurposing’ Trend,” Communication Review 9, no.1 (January-March 2006): 63-84.
“All Documentary, All the Time,” Television & New Media 3, no. 1 (January 2002): 7-28.
Book Chapters
"The Paradox of the Charismatic Pig in The Simpsons Movie and Okja," in Animal Satire, ed. Robert McKay and Susan McHugh (Springer Link, 2023), 333-348.“Authorship and Auteurism,” The Craft of Media Criticism, ed. M. C. Kearney and M. Kackman (Routledge, 2018), 109-121.
“Author,” in Keywords for Media Studies, ed. L. Ouellette and J. Gray (New York University Press, 2017), 21-23.
“Subjunctive Desires: ‘Becoming Animal’ in Green Porno and Seduce Me,” in Animal Life and the Moving Image, ed. L. McMahon and M. Lawrence (British Film Institute, 2015).
“Boys Gone Wild: The Animal and the Abject,” in Animals and the Human Imagination, ed. A. Gross and A. Vallely (Columbia University Press, April 2012), 152-173.
Contact Information
Fall 2026, starting August 31: Monday and Wednesday, 12:30pm-2:00pm, 1P-104