Profile

Colin Williamson is a historian of animation, special effects, and nontheatrical film who specializes in early cinema’s place in international histories of art, science, and technology. His interests are wide-ranging and include everything from the history of film theory and representations of the landscape in American cinema to media archaeology and experimental uses of film and media archives. Colin is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which charts the history of special effects films as forms of popular science education; and a new book, Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (under contract at University of Minnesota Press), which examines the overlooked impacts that the natural sciences and discourses on the environment have had on stylistic trends in mainstream American cartoons. He is also currently Associate Editor at Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.