Directory Profile

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Thomas Patrick Pringle is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Prior to joining USC, Pringle was Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and Assistant Professor of Communication and Environmental Studies at Tulane University. He has held research fellowships with the Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University, the SenseLab at Concordia University, and SSHRC. Pringle serves on the editorial boards of Film History: An International Journal and Journal of Environmental Media.

Pringle focuses on historical approaches to film and media, with an emphasis on how media shape the intelligibility of environments and how technologies interact with physical environments. With Gertrud Koch and the late Bernard Stiegler, Pringle co-authored Machine (University of Minnesota Press/Meson Press, 2019). His writing on cinema, media, and the environment appears in journals like Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Environmental Communication, New Media & Society, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, and Journal of Film and Video, as well as the volumes Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (ed. Livia Monnet, 2022) and Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy (eds. Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel, 2025).

Pringle has three related research programs. The first is a book manuscript titled The Climate Proxy: Media Historiography and Global Heating that looks to archival cinema and media to explain why certain images stand in for, or dispute, global warming. The Climate Proxy charts the evolution of climate research as a shifting foundation for the knowledge communicated by non-fiction media. This is critical to understanding the present moment of political impasse because climate change has recently become legible in iconographic images adaptable to agendas at odds with environmental justice. The book historicizes illustrative mediations of climate change that show how the widespread acceptance of global warming now informs arguments for continued fossil fuel development, xenophobia, eugenics, and finance capitalism. The Climate Proxy builds an original media-historical theory for understanding how these negative mediations became possible. In a moment when large majorities believe climate change is happening, media historical inquiry must move beyond the denial of global heating and reconstruct how the climate came to be known on terms that reinforce the problem itself. Articles from this project are available here and here.

The second is a monograph titled Streaming Capital: Media History and the Green Economy, which compiles a critical media history of natural capitalist economics and assesses how film and media—from ecological and resource imaging to oil corporation propaganda and greenwashing’s digital turn—have participated in the conjoint imperial projects of monetarily valuing biophysical environments and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Read more about this argument here.

Finally, Pringle’s archival research gives an account of how cinema and media practitioners facilitated the global, and globalizing, circulation of American environmentalist ideals. Parts of this research are available here and here.

Recent Publications:

"Spatial Documentary and Just Remediation in Climate Aesthetics," Media Fields Journal, pp. 1-10, 2025: http://bit.ly/4nYR4JU 

"Political Climates: Proxy, Population, and Global Heating," Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 35-63, 2025: https://bit.ly/3SpGUUu 

"Climate Scenarios and the Documentary Mediation of National Security," Environmental Communication, 1-15, 2025: https://bit.ly/431rE5i 

“Documentary: Why is Uncertainty Useful?” Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy and Environment. Eds. Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel. West Virginia UP, April 2025: bit.ly/4hOsgkR.

“Industrial Melanism and the Mass Filament,” Docalogue.com entry on The Night Visitors (2023): https://bit.ly/44vLsA6.

"Environmental Documentary and the History of Ecological Ideas: A Syllabus,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies: Teaching Media. Vol. 9, No. 1:  https://bit.ly/4aFdJnl

"The whole earth and apartheid: Media, peer-production, segregation," New Media & Society, Vol. 25, No. 8, pp. 1863-1887. 2023: bit.ly/43qfBg5

“Emergency/Salvage Archeology: Excavating Media and Uranium in the Glen Canyon,” Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Futures and Legacies. Ed. Livia Monnet. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s UP. 2022: https://bit.ly/47o0vM7

“Streaming is Doing: The Environmental Impact of Digital Media and the Ecosystem Service Economy,” Spectator, Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 8-18. 2022: bit.ly/46QIcy7

"Manufactured Uncertainty and the Media History of Risk,” Formations: The IFK Blog. 2021: https://bit.ly/3vHl03b

“The Tech Ecosystem and the Colony,” Heliotrope Journal. Environmental Media Lab. 2021: https://bit.ly/3WdvbJr 

“The Ecosystem is an Apparatus: From Machinic Ecology to the Politics of Resilience,” Machine. Co-authored with Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler. In Search of Media Series. Lüneburg, Germany and Minneapolis, USA: Meson Press and University of Minnesota Press. 2019: https://bit.ly/3DI5WYG