Welcome!
Dr Latsis is a historian and digital humanist working at the intersection of archiving and visual culture. He is Associate Professor in Digital and Audiovisual Preservation at the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies. His work on American visual culture, early cinema, archival studies and the Digital Humanities has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, Domitor, Mellon and Knight Foundations and Canada’s Social Studies and Humanities Research Council, among others. He has published and lectured widely in these fields, including co-editing a special issue of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists on the topic of Digital Humanities and/in Film Archives and an anthology on documentaries about the visual arts in the 1950s and 60s for Bloomsbury Academic.
His book on the historiography of American cinema during the silent years, How the Movies Got a Past, was published in August 2023 by Oxford University Press. He has consulted for a variety of national and international projects in digital archiving and serves on the scholarly advisory board of Library of Congress and WGBH-supported American Archive of Public Broadcasting, and on the technical working group of the Canadian National Heritage Digital Project. He was part of the inaugural cohort of Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows in Visual Data Curation sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources during which he was appointed as film curator at the Internet Archive and visiting research scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Before joining UA SLIS, Dr. Latsis served as Assistant Professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto where he taught and supervised students in the graduate programs in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management, and in Communication and Culture.