Associate Professor

About

  • Role:

    Faculty

  • Position:

    • Associate Professor

  • Concentration:

    • Media History
    • Media, Labor, and the Economy
    • Cultural Studies
    • Industrial, Institutional, and Useful Media
    • Preservation and Archives Studies

  • Department:

    • Communication Studies

  • Education:

    • Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison

  • Curriculum Vitae:

Biography

Kit Hughes is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies. She specializes in useful and workplace media, economic education, and histories of technology. Her book, Television at Work, explores how American business developed workplace television as a medium of industrial efficiency, ideological orientation, and corporate expansion. More recently, her research on NYSE educational film, public television consumer programming, and the tech industry's promotion of datafied managerialism and employee wearables in the context of professional basketball asks where our ideas about the economy come from, how they circulate, and how they impact our world.

Her research on sponsored film, workplace media, early video formats, and digital humanities methods can be found in a range of journals and edited collections, including Film History, Media, Culture & Society, Television & New Media, The Arclight Guidebook, Media Industries Journal, and Film Criticism. Her article in American Archivist on cultural studies approaches to appraisal won the 2014 Ernst Posner Award for most outstanding article published by the journal that year.

Hughes has contributed to several media history digital humanities projects, including Unlocking the Airwaves, Project Arclight, Media History Digital Library, and Lantern, the last of which was recognized with the 2014 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award.

From 2019-2022, Hughes served as lead Humanities Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts. She is Co-Director of the Center for Engaged Humanities' Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (director: Michael Carolan, $500,000). Prior to joining CSU, she taught at Miami University, worked as an archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and volunteered as an AmeriCorps VISTA in Baltimore, Maryland.

Publications

Selected Publications

2023. Kit Hughes and Evan Elkins, "Silicon Valley's Team: The Golden State Warriors, Datified Managerialism, and Basketball's Racialized Geography" American Quarterly 75, no. 3. 471-499.

2020. Kit Hughes, Television at Work: Industrial Media and American Labor. New York: Oxford University Press.

2020. Kit Hughes, Industrial, Institutional and Educational Television and Video. Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies

2020. Kit Hughes, “Market Research as Portraiture: Thomas Hope Sketches the Audiovisual Industry," The Moving Image 19, no. 2. 1-25.

2019. Kit Hughes, “Developing the student-citizen of finance: sponsored film at the New York Stock Exchange, 1947–1973," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 40, no. 2. 325-348.

2017. Kit Hughes, “Disposable: Useful Cinema on Early Television,” Critical Studies in Television. 12, no. 2. 102-120.

2016. Kit Hughes, “Record/Film/Book/Interactive TV: EVR as Threshold Format,” Television and New Media. 17, no. 1. 44-61. Special Section: Sociotechnical Perspectives.

2016. Kit Hughes, “Field Sketches with Arclight: Mapping the Industrial Film Sector” in Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities. Eds. Eric Hoyt and Charles Acland. Sussex: REFRAME Books.

2015. Kit Hughes, Eric Hoyt, Derek Long, Kevin Ponto, and Tony Tran, “Hacking Radio History’s Data: Station Call Signs, Digitized Magazines, and Scaled Entity Search,” Media Industries Journal. 2, no. 2.

2015. Kit Hughes, “‘For Pete’s sake, I’m not trying to entertain these people’: Film and Franchising at International Harvester,” Film History 27, no. 3. 41-72.

2014. Kit Hughes, “‘Work/place’ Media: Locating Laboring Audiences,” Media, Culture and Society. 36, no. 5 (July): 644-660.

2014. Kit Hughes, “Appraisal as Cartography: Cultural Studies in the Archive,” American Archivist. 77, no. 1 (Spring-Summer): 270-296.

  • Winner of Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award for most outstanding essay to appear in American Archivist in 2014.

2011. Kit Hughes, “Ailing Screens, Viral Video: Technological Ghosts in Kyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse,” Film Criticism. (36.2: Winter): 22-42.

Courses

  • Media and the Economy (Graduate Seminar – SPCM 792C)

    Syllabus

  • Media and Meaningful War (SPCM 497 Capstone)

  • Theories and Methods of Archival Research (Graduate Seminar, SPCM 792C)

  • Professional Writing and Public Scholarship (SPCM 702)

    Syllabus

  • Evaluating Contemporary Television (SPCM 341)

    Syllabus