About
Dr. Latsis’s work bridges history, digital humanities, and audiovisual preservation, with a focus on the relationship between archiving and American visual culture. He is an Associate Professor in Digital and Audiovisual Preservation at the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies.
A historian and digital humanist, Dr. Latsis specializes in American visual culture, early cinema, archival studies, and the Digital Humanities. His research has been supported by major organizations and foundations including the Smithsonian Institution, Domitor, the Mellon and Knight Foundations, and Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Dr. Latsis has published and lectured widely in these fields. His scholarly contributions include co-editing a special issue of The Moving Image—the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists—focused on Digital Humanities in film archives, as well as co-editing an anthology for Bloomsbury Academic on documentaries about the visual arts in the 1950s and 1960s.
His recent book, How the Movies Got a Past: The Historiography of American Cinema During the Silent Years, was published in August 2023 by Oxford University Press.
Impact Beyond the University
Dr. Latsis has consulted on a variety of national and international projects in digital archiving and preservation. He serves on the scholarly advisory board of the 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 also part of the inaugural cohort of Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows in Visual Data Curation sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources. During this fellowship, he served as a film curator at the Internet Archive and as a visiting research scholar at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
A Commitment to Digital Preservation and Visual Culture Scholarship
Before joining the University of Alabama, Dr. Latsis served as an Assistant Professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto, where he taught and supervised graduate students in Film and Photography Preservation, Collections Management, and Communication and Culture.
Through his research, teaching, and leadership in digital archiving initiatives, Dr. Latsis prepares students to engage critically with audiovisual heritage and the evolving role of archives in the digital age.