How was the figure of the explorer represented in American popular culture and the films screened at New York City’s Explorers Club? This talk examines the dialectics of adventure as a portal into the vexed underbelly of exploration, a space to recuperate counterhistorical readings of Indigenous agency.

Speaker, Alison Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York and the Graduate Center. She is the author of three monographs from Columbia University Press. Her most recent book, Nomadic Cinema: A Cultural Geography of the Expedition Film (Columbia, 2025), was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship.