Dr Christopher Holliday

Christopher gained his PhD in Film Studies from King’s College London in 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 (2008) with Distinction. Prior to joining the interdisciplinary Liberal Arts department in 2017, Christopher was a Graduate Teaching Assistant (2010-2015) and Teaching Fellow (2015-2017) in Film Studies at King’s, and also acted as convenor of the London and Film module for the university’s Summer School programme. He previously taught modules in Film and Media at the University of Kent (2014), University of Surrey (2015), and on the BA Film Practice course at London South Bank University (2013-2015). He became Lecturer in Liberal Arts and Visual Cultures Education in 2021, and since 2017 has also acted as the department’s Admissions Tutor.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Popular Hollywood cinema
• Digital media and film technology
• Animation history and theory
• Visual effects imagery
• Cultural politics of popular media

Christopher’s research is largely concerned with digital media technologies and forms of computer animation in contemporary visual culture and Hollywood cinema. He is specifically interested in popular filmmaking’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. The book provides a genre analysis of computer animation informed by wider technological discourses and the status of animation as an industrial art form, connecting elements of film style to the computer-animated film’s unique production contexts. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre was shortlisted for the international Society for Animation Studies 2019 McLaren-Lambart Award for the Best Scholarly Book on Animation.

In 2018, Christopher also 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 Runner-Up prize for Best Edited Collection in 2019. His latest book is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021) published as part of Bloomsbury’s Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series. This new edited collection 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, Journal of British Cinema and Television, Journal of Popular Film and Television, The London Journal and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, and he has forthcoming articles in the Journal of Early Popular Visual Culture and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. 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; for the international Society of Animation Studies blog animationstudies2.0; and in the popular film magazine Total Film. 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 other new project concerns computer graphics and compositing in relation to the cultural politics of identity. This new research investigates the evolving modes and forms of CG characters, cyborgs and posthuman subjects within post-millennial Hollywood film as shifting sites of digital reproduction, labour and convergence. It examines the development of such ‘digital body politics’ within a cross-section of recent U.S. cinema, looking at the exchange between computer technologies and the representation of virtual bodies across different intersections of a range of cultural identity paradigms.

Christopher is also the co-founder and curator of http://www.fantasy-animation.org, a collaborative and open access educational resource that examines the relationship between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. The website’s blog and podcast engage with several interdisciplinary fields, projects and activities, and provide a space for discussion among academics, artists, curators, practitioners, special interest groups/organisations and fans of fantasy and animation. The website publishes a weekly blog, as well as a fortnightly podcast that has featured numerous interviews with guests from the worlds of academia, film journalism, film curation and archiving, the global VFX and Hollywood animation industries, stop-motion animation, graphic illustration and organized fan communities. The podcast and blog have appeared on university reading lists at institutions across the U.K., U.S. and Australia, while the podcast has also entered Apple’s “Film and TV” podcasts in Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Estonia, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Russia, Sweden, Slovenia, Turkey and the U.K. In December 2020, the Fantasy/Animation podcast was recommended as the Film Stories magazine’s “British Movie Podcast of the week.”

For more details and a complete list of Christopher’s publications, please see his full research profile.

Teaching

Christopher teaches on the core interdisciplinary modules within the department of Liberal Arts, and on the Film Studies BA and MA programmes at King’s. He has convened several courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level with a particular emphasis on interdisciplinary enquiry and historical, contextual and theoretical approaches to screen media, visual cultures and forms of creative production. This includes modules in the areas of popular U.S. cinema, contemporary approaches to the analysis of film and film culture, classical film theory, cities on screen, film genre, international film history, and the theory and spectatorship of animated media. His opportunity module, From Innovation to Illusion: Topics in Animation, is currently available to students across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

In 2016, Christopher was awarded the prestigious ‘Innovation in Teaching’ prize at the Arts & Humanities Teaching Excellence Awards for his work across both Film Studies and Liberal Arts departments.

Expertise & public engagement

Christopher has spoken on popular culture, animation history, Hollywood cinema, and contemporary digital technology at various events, screenings, festivals, and academic institutions. He has presented on his research and teaching across the U.K. and to international audiences in the U.S., Canada, Portugal, France, and Germany; 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 U.S. animator and illustrator Gene Deitch. In March 2020, he was an invited panellist at the Animation: The Write Stuff public event held at the British Film Institute, and has previously spoken at The Book Club and Genesis Cinema in London; at the Matchbox Cineclub held at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow; on panels at the KCL Film Studies Festival and KCL Race Equality Network (at the college’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience); and as part of the University of Surrey’s Animation: 100 Years of Artistry and Innovation series. In February 2019, he recorded a live podcast episode at the London Anime & Gaming Convention organised by the Animeleague, and between September 2019 and February 2020 curated a series of public screenings and podcast recordings at the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London, featuring Q&As with animators, artists, and academics. Since 2017, Christopher has also been part of the Canterbury Anifest organising committee as symposium director, running both academic events and free animation/drawing workshops for children. In February 2021, he organised and delivered educational content for a special crossover event Fantasy/Animation@Anifest, which featured podcast recordings, a roundtable discussion on diversity and inclusion (discussing the Fantasy/Animation website’s publication of its Anti-Racist Syllabus), and a live Q&A with festival attendees.

Christopher 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 reader for Bloomsbury Publishing; peer reviewer for ten academic journals related to film and new media technologies across the creative industries; and is a member of the Society for Animation Studies (SAS), Society for Cinema and Media (SCMS) and international VFX Research Network.

He is currently involved in the ongoing Animation Heroes for Our Time project led by the University of Nottingham and supported by the British Council’s pilot Digital Collaboration Fund, and with Higher Education partners and creative professionals across the U.K., China, South Korea and the U.S. The aim of the project is to develop a series of characters and stories as part of the project’s Intellectual Property, and testing the IP as a potential storytelling tool for stage, screen, multi-media exhibitions, immersive exhibition experiences and ‘edutainment’ initiatives.