Christopher Holliday (King’s College London)

Dr Christopher Holliday is Senior Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education, and the Deputy Director and Education Lead of the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities. He gained his PhD in Film Studies from King’s College London (2013), having previously been an undergraduate and postgraduate student at the University of Warwick where he graduated with a First-Class BA Honours degree in Film and Television Studies (2006) and an MA for Research in Film and Television Studies with Distinction (2008). Christopher has taught Film, Media, and Cultural Studies at a variety of UK universities, including at King’s as a Teaching Fellow (2015-2017) in the Department of Film Studies, and at the University of Kent (2014), University of Surrey (2015), and as part of the BA Film Practice course at London South Bank University (2013-2015). He is currently a visiting lecturer at the London Film Academy and consultant for the New York-based animation consulting studio Story Critters.

Christopher’s research is largely concerned with digital media technologies and forms of computer animation in contemporary visual culture. He is specifically interested in Hollywood cinema’s multiple encounters with digital elements and effects. Christopher’s first monograph The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) was the first academic work to examine the computer-animated feature film as a global phenomenon of popular cinema. It was shortlisted for the international Society for Animation Studies 2019 McLaren-Lambart Award for the Best Scholarly Book on Animation. In 2018, Christopher co-edited the collection Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres for Routledge’s AFI Film Readers series, which considers the various historical, theoretical and cultural dimensions of the animated fantasy. The book was awarded the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) Runner-Up prize for Best Edited Collection in 2019. His most recent book was the edited collection Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021) published as part of Bloomsbury’s Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series. The anthology explores the enduring qualities that have marked Snow White’s influence and legacy, as well as the film’s central place within the history of global animation.

Christopher continues to publish widely on Hollywood cinema, popular animation, and digital media. His work has appeared in Animation Practice, Process & Production, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture, Journal of Popular Film and Television, and The London Journal. He has also written on animation and contemporary media culture for The Independent; on the Impakter, Peephole Journal, The Conversation, In Media Res and Critical Studies in Television websites; and for the popular film publication Total Film and MUBI’s Notebook magazine. He is also a regular contributor to the international Society of Animation Studies blog animationstudies2.0.

Christopher is currently co-editing two critical anthologies. The first is focused on characters and aesthetics in animation as part of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Animation Studies series, to be published with Bloomsbury in 2025. The second is an interdisciplinary examination of the connections between animation as an industrial and creative art form and studies of performance. His new monograph, Smart Stardom: Advanced Digital Technologies and the Replication of Celebrity (co-written with Sarah Thomas), will be published as part of the Routledge Focus on Digital Media and Culture series in 2025.

Christopher has spoken widely on popular culture, animation history, Hollywood cinema, and contemporary digital technology at various events, screenings, festivals, and academic institutions around the world. He has been invited to discuss his research and teaching practice at the Universities of Surrey, Southampton, East Anglia, Wolverhampton, Warwick, Notre Dame, and Reading, and at the Leeds Humanities Research Institute, Teesside University, Birkbeck University, London South Bank University, Queen’s University Belfast, and the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow (UK). He has also given invited lectures at the Erzurum Metropolitan Municipality İbrahim Erkal Dadaş Culture and Art Center (Turkey), Università degli Studi di Udine (Italy), University of Zagreb (Croatia), Concordia University (Canada), Universidade lusófona de humanidades e tecnologias (Portugal), Sciences Po (France), Leuphana Universität Lüneburg (Germany), University of Oulu (Finland), EF Academy Pasadena, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Radford University (US), University of Groningen (Netherlands), and The Australian National University.

Christopher has collaborated with the Barbican, British Film Institute, British Library, The Book Club, Canterbury Anifest, Cinema Museum, Genesis Cinema, and the London Anime & Gaming Convention, and was recently an invited panellist at the 2024 Annecy Film Festival in France. He has also been interviewed for The Guardian, The New Statesman, BBC News and several BBC Radio programmes, and appeared on the BBC Arts website and international arts review programme Showcase TRT discussing Walt Disney animation and US animator and illustrator Gene Deitch. Christopher currently sits on the editorial board of animation: an interdisciplinary journal where he has also been one of its Associate Editors since 2018, and in early 2021 joined the Advisory Board for Bloomsbury’s Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series. He is a reviewer for several international publishers (University of California Press, Edinburgh University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Rutgers University Press) and for the Czech and Israel Science Foundations (2022-), and assessor for the Research Fellowships Competition at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (2019-), Kone Foundation (2020-), Irish Research Council (IRC) (2021-), and the NIAS Fellowship, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021-).

And as many listeners will know, Christopher also enjoys life as Alexander Sergeant’s begrudging co-host on the Fantasy-Animation podcast.

For a complete list of Christopher’s publications, please click here, or visit his King’s College London institutional profile here.

Recent publications

2024

• Ghosts in the Celluloid: AI Video Dubbing and TrueSync.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 64, no. 1 (‘In Focus: AI and the Moving Image’ dossier, ed. Mihaela Mihailova) (Fall 2024): 175–182.

• “Lucas Meets Luxo: Lucasfilm’s Computer Graphics Lab (CGL) and the Development of Pixar Animation Studios.” (Co-written with Chris Pallant), Lucas: His Hollywood Legacy. Ed. Richard Ravalli (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2024), 173–186.

2023

• “On Teaching With and About Disney Animation.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies – Teaching Media Dossier 8, no. 2 (‘Teaching Disney’ dossier, ed. Peter C. Kunze) (Fall 2023). Available here.

• Walt’s Art History: Late Style, Digital Aesthetics and the ‘Disney Baroque’

  animation: an interdisciplinary journal 18, no. 1 (March 2023): 78-95. Available here.

2022

• “Aardman’s Animal Farm: “Loaded” Livestock and Illustrative Aesthetics in Shaun the Sheep (2007–).” Children, Youth, and International Television. Eds. Adrian Schober and Debbie Olson (London: Routledge, 2022), 151-170.

• “Retroframing the Future: Digital De-aging Technologies in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no. 5 (2021-2022): 210-237.

2021

• “Rewriting the Stars: Surface Tensions and Gender Troubles in the Online Media Production of Digital Deepfakes.”
  Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27, no. 4 (August): 899-918. Available here.

• “Old Dog, New Tricks”: James Bond’s Digital Chaos.” The International Journal of James Bond Studies 4, no. 1 (May): 1-24. Available here.

• “Tim Burton’s Unruly Animation.” In Tim Burton’s Bodies: Gothic, Animated, Corporeal and Creaturely, edited by Fran Pheasant-Kelly & Stella Hockenhull, 42-53. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press