Profile

Books: 

In progress, Williamson, Colin. Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (under contract, University of Minnesota Press)

2015 Williamson, Colin. Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press). 

Edited Books: 

In progress, Editor, Copy/Rights and Early Cinema (Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema), co-edited with Tami Williams, Ian Christie, Martin Johnson, and Maggie Hennefeld. 

Articles in Refereed Journals: 

2022 Williamson, Colin. “The Garden in the Laboratory: Arthur C. Pillsbury and the American Conservation Movement.” Philosophies 7 (5). 

2022 Williamson, Colin. “The (Un)Natural History Film: Formalist Tendencies Old and New.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 20 (1): 63-73. 

2021 Williamson, Colin. “Observations on the Origins of Life and Animation: David Lebrun’s Proteus: A Nineteenth Century Vision.” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 43 (3): 383-420. 

2020 Ellis, Patrick and Colin Williamson. “Object Lessons, Old and New: Experimental Media Archaeology in the Classroom.” Early Popular Visual Culture 18 (1): 2-14. 

2019 Williamson, Colin. “‘Pagan Constellations in the Sky’: (Re)Animating Muybridge in the Film History Classroom.” The Moving Image 19 (1): 75–92. 

2019 Williamson, Colin. “Nature and the Wonders of the Moving Image: John Ott’s Postwar Popular Science Filmmaking.” Film History 31 (3): 27–54. 

2018 Williamson, Colin. “‘An Escape into Reality’: Computers, Special Effects, and the Haunting Optics of Westworld (1973).” Imaginations 9 (1). 

Chapters in Books: 

2025 Williamson, Colin. “Early Animation and the Cosmopolitanism of Segundo de Chomón.” In Cook, Malcolm, Natália Pinazza, Stefanie Van de Peer and Daisy Yan Du. Encyclopedia of Animation Studies, Vol 1: Geographies and Histories (London: Bloomsbury). (Under contract) 

2025 Williamson, Colin. “Wandering Eyes: A Brief Archaeology of Animated Deep Space Illusions.” In Bloom, Peter, and Dominique Jullien. Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). (Under contract) 

2019 Williamson, Colin. “The Politics of Vanishing Celluloid: Rediscovering Fort Rupert and the Kwakwaka’wakw in American Ethnographic Film.” In Field, Allyson Nadia, and Marsha Gordon. Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Durham: Duke University Press).