About

Hollis Griffin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan's LSA. He teaches and researches the cultural politics of television, the internet, and social media, with particular focus on their intersections with affect, sexuality, and questions of space and place. His work explores how media industries and urban environments influence and reflect social and cultural dynamics, especially within LGBTQ+ communities. Griffin authored the book 'Feeling Normal: Sexuality and Media Criticism in the Digital Age,' which was recognized as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice in 2017, demonstrating how LGBTQ+ bars and clubs in U.S. urban centers serve as historical precedents for digital media's role in courtship and community formation. His ongoing research includes a project titled 'Media and the Metropolis,' which examines New York City as a collection of cultural technologies that manage urban populations through various mediated encounters, including cinema, television, and online media. Griffin's scholarly contributions extend to numerous publications in prominent journals and edited volumes, and he has served on editorial boards and the Board of Directors for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, reflecting his active engagement in the field of media studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Media studies
• Law
• Social psychology
• Multimedia
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• A Great Place: Sitcoms, Apartments, and New York City

  Television & New Media · 2025-12-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay considers how U.S. television sitcoms set in New York City that first circulated on broadcast networks in the 1990s and 2000s generate discourse on apartment living and urban space. Departing from The Friends Experience , an immersive entertainment staged in shopping malls following the twenty-fifth anniversary of Friends (NBC, 1994–2004), the essay considers how the fantasies associated with apartment living became a recognizable programing trend during a specific moment in time, as well as how those programs have lingered in the time since. Programs discussed include Friends , Seinfeld (NBC, 1989–1997), Living Single (Fox, 1993–1998), and Mad About You (NBC, 1992–1999, 2019). Of particular interest: how sitcoms set in New York City apartment buildings during this era both normalize encounters with otherness and educate consumer desire.

  PublisherDOI

• Sexual diversity and streaming television: Toward a platform studies approach to analyzing LGBTQ+ TV

  Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies · 2024 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science

  This essay argues for the utility of a platform-studies approach alongside textual analysis when studying the politics of sexual representation in contemporary television programming. Using a corpus of four LGBTQ+-themed programs that represent queer and trans sexualities and HIV/AIDS, the paper argues that funding mechanisms play a constitutive role in determining the kinds of sexual diversity that can circulate via streaming technologies. Comparing and contrasting content created for SVODs, BVODs, and video-sharing platforms, the essay considers the impact that the economic diversity of television’s multiplatform ecology has on the sexual diversity of content that circulates there. Purposefully combining an analysis of online TV with social media entertainment, the essay casts ‘streaming television’ as a wide, varied category whose relationship to questions of representational diversity is more complex than existing scholarship on these issues sometimes suggests. Situating its analysis in the literatures of platform studies, media industry studies, and television’s politics of LGBTQ + representation, the essay shifts the purview of ‘diversity’ away from representations of identity and toward diversities of funding mechanisms and diversities of sexual acts and practices. The essay argues for the necessity of textual analysis to properly articulate the relationship between platforms and the politics of sexual representation in the content that they circulate.

  PublisherDOI

• Doing Bad Film History

  2024-12-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter looks to portraiture and other photography produced by director John Waters as source material for imagining new conceptual frames and alternative research methodologies for doing film historiography. Using an archive culled from Waters' 2018–2019 museum retrospective Indecent Exposure, the essay mobilizes the idea of bad film history as offering new ways of thinking about cinema's past: first questioning objects, “a history of bad films,” and then interrogating methods, “doing film history badly.” The movies that Waters takes up in his art evince errors of refinement and canonicity; he focuses on exploitation cinema, hygiene films, and lowbrow horror movies and melodramas, which are not the most obvious entrants in narrating film history. Furthermore, the works collected in Indecent Exposure feature odd notions of scale and focus insofar as they highlight elements of moviemaking that are frequently overlooked or just deemed uninteresting: shooting scripts, place markers, small details of costumes, and actors' bodies. In doing so, he brings otherwise invisible elements of film history to the foreground. As such, the essay casts Indecent Exposure as a methodological intervention in film historiography, wherein Waters reimagines what should be included in film canons and reconfigures conventional approaches to framing film history.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: Media and the Affective Life of Slavery, by Allison Page

  Television & New Media · 2023-08-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• When mass culture meets high culture: reality television and big data at the art museum

  Communication Culture and Critique · 2023-10-20

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article examines cultural beliefs related to reality television and social media, using a museum installation as a point of departure for examining the persistence of particular ideas about taste and aesthetic value as they relate to mass media in a historical moment when audiences are more frequently small and specialized. Its case study is an artwork that creates a data visualization from social media analytics related to American Idol, America’s Got Talent, America’s Next Top Model, and America’s Best Dance Crew. Using discourse analysis, the article unpacks how the installation establishes connections between televised contests, social media activity, and U.S. national identity. The author argues that the installation predicates its critique of reality television and social media on collapsing the differences between disparate programs, animating hierarchies of taste between various publics, and simplifying emergent industry practices related to big data.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>It’s a Sin</i> : AIDS as incipient crisis

  European Journal of Cultural Studies · 2022-07-05

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The HBO miniseries It’s a Sin (2021) offers viewers a kind of social history of the AIDS epidemic in the U.K. Across its five episodes, the program depicts ordinary people’s first encounters with the pandemic as they manage misinformation, overcome their disbelief, and, eventually, come to terms with the shock and trauma of its impact on the gay male communities of 1980s-era London. The result is a program in which viewers are asked to question how they might have navigated past events under such circumstances, a period in which a mysterious illness moved from the shadowy periphery to the very center of a community’s existence.

  PublisherDOI

• Living Through It: Anger, Laughter, and Internet Memes in Dark Times

  International Journal of Cultural Studies · 2020 · 30 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  In this article, the author examines online political discourse as it is made manifest in internet memes in order to illuminate the lived, felt dimensions of progressive politics at a historical moment when those politics seem especially imperiled. The author argues for an understanding of online engagements with politics as being borne of oscillation as users move between platforms as well as affective states. The goal: to underscore how anger and laughter provide progressives with different opportunities to weather, make fun of, and combat the ascendancy of right-wing populism. Rooted in literature on affect and scholarship on internet memes, especially feminist internet memes, the article examines several different memes that circulated between 2016 and 2020, including #pussygrabsback, #neverthelessshepersisted, Prankster Joe Biden memes, and Creepy Joe Biden memes.

  PublisherDOI

• The Politics of Merely Following: Witnessing AIDS on Instagram

  New Media & Society · 2020 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  Using an illustrative sample of posts to an Instagram account devoted to commemorating lives lost to AIDS, this article articulates a less-than-intense form of engagement with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) politics on social media. Merely following particular accounts on social media networks enables an encounter with an Other that is shaped by the affordances of digital technologies and the specificities of particular platforms. A site of political engagement that is further contoured by hierarchies of sex, race, and gender, @theaidsmemorial offers evidence of user experiences that are less focused and intentional than those typically associated with progressive sexual politics. Nevertheless, the author argues that they are meaningful because of how they expose users to bodies, lives, and desires they may not encounter if not for social media.

  PublisherDOI

• The Politics of Sexuality in Mediated Cities

  2019-09-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  After reviewing key debates about sexual identities and the city as a space of both oppression and freedom, I look at the role played by media in the construction of the city as such space. Specifically, I explore how the travel-themed television series Round Trip Ticket and Bump! construct LGBT neighborhoods as spaces of consumption for sexual minority audiences. These representations draw upon a long history of such neighborhoods, which have, for centuries, provided safe harbor and opportunities for community building for sexual minority people. However, the desire to be among like-minded others is represented as a need that can be satisfied in the marketplace. The programs paint consumption as providing a means for the self-actualization of sexual minority viewers and an avenue for their participation in communities of people like themselves.

  PublisherDOI

• Queer Television

  Cinema and Media Studies · 2019-03-27

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  People use the term “queer television” to refer to a number of different things: representations of sexual minorities on television programs, as well as programming that is associated with, has a strong following among, or is created by sexual minorities. It is also a term that names a way of studying television to better understand how it participates in the social construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. Queer television studies encompasses a variety of different topics, including how sexuality is represented in television programs, how it operates in particular genres, the ways in which it informs viewer interpretations, how it figures into the business and production practices of the television industry, and how activists engage with it in order to advocate for social justice. Scholars of queer television are interested in how sexuality relates to the pleasures of watching television as well as how sexuality relates to the power relations perpetuated by television (e.g., valuing some identity groups over others, etc.). For that reason, research on queer television that emerges from cinema and media studies is qualitative in nature. Because “pleasure” and understandings of power hierarchies can be subjective, scholars of queer television studies often “take a stand.” Doing so makes research in the area a purposefully political endeavor. The scholars who practice it see meaningful information about the medium and the world around it emerging from careful, rigorous research on the relationship between television and sexuality.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eric Freedman

  Michigan State University

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Screen Cultures; Radio, Television, and Film; School of Communication

  Northwestern University

  2010

• MA, Radio, Television, & Film

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2005

Awards & honors

• Outstanding Academic Title for 2017 by Choice