Christopher gained his PhD in Film Studies from King’s College London in 2013, having previously been an undergraduate and postgraduate student at the University of Warwick, where he graduated with a first-class BA Honours degree in Film and Television Studies (2006) and an MA for Research in Film and Television Studies (2008) with Distinction. Prior to joining the interdisciplinary Liberal Arts department in 2017, Christopher was formerly a Graduate Teaching Assistant (2010-2015) and Teaching Fellow (2015-2017) in Film Studies at King’s, and also acted as convenor of the London and Film module for the university’s Summer School programme and on a variety of Pre-University Taster courses. He also taught modules in Film and Media at the University of Kent (2014), University of Surrey (2015), and on the BA Film Practice course at London South Bank University (2013-2015).

• Popular Hollywood cinema
• Digital media and film technology
• Animation history and theory
• Visual effects imagery
• Film genre

Christopher’s research is largely concerned with the interdependence of style and meaning in contemporary Hollywood cinema, with an emphasis on digital media technologies and forms of computer animation. He is specifically interested in popular filmmaking’s multiple encounters with digital elements and effects. Christopher’s first monograph, The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) was the first academic work to examine the computer-animated feature film as a global phenomenon of popular cinema. The book provides a genre analysis of computer animation informed by wider technological discourses and the status of animation as an industrial art form, connecting elements of film style to the computer-animated film’s unique production contexts. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre was shortlisted for the international Society for Animation Studies 2019 McLaren-Lambart Award for the Best Scholarly Book on Animation.

In 2018, Christopher also co-edited the collection Fantasy/Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres for Routledge’s AFI Film Readers series, which considers the various historical, theoretical and cultural dimensions of the animated fantasy. The book was awarded the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Runner-Up prize for Best Edited Collection in 2019. His latest book is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy (2021) published as part of Bloomsbury’s Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers series. This new edited collection explores the enduring qualities that have marked Snow White's influence and legacy, as well as the film’s central place within the history of global animation.

Christopher continues to publish widely on Hollywood cinema, popular animation, and digital media, including work in Animation Practice, Process & Production and animation: an interdisciplinary journal (where he is also an Associate Editor). His writing on animation has appeared on the Impakter, Peephole Journal, The Conversation and In Media Res websites; in the popular international film magazine Total Film; and on the BBC website. He is also a regular contributor to the international Society of Animation Studies blog animationstudies2.0. Christopher is currently co-editing an anthology focused on characters and aesthetics in animation as part of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Animation Studies series, to be published with Bloomsbury in 2024. His other new project concerns computer graphics and compositing in relation to the cultural politics of identity. This research investigates the evolving modes and forms of CG characters, cyborgs and posthuman subjects within post-millennial Hollywood film as shifting sites of digital reproduction, labour and convergence. It examines the development of such ‘digital body politics’ within a cross-section of recent U.S. cinema, looking at the exchange between computer technologies and the representation of virtual bodies across different intersections of a range of cultural identity paradigms.

Christopher is also the curator and co-founder of http://www.fantasy-animation.org, a collaborative and open access educational resource that examines the relationship between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. The website’s blog and podcast engage with a number of interdisciplinary fields, projects and activities, and provide a space for discussion among academics, artists, curators, practitioners, special interest groups/organisations and fans of fantasy and animation. The website publishes a weekly blog, as well as a fortnightly podcast that has featured numerous interviews with guests from the worlds of academia, film journalism, film curation and archiving, the global VFX industry, stop-motion animation, graphic illustration and organized fan communities. The podcast recently entered Apple’s Top 100 “Film and TV” podcasts, and in December 2020 was recommended as the Film Stories magazine’s “British Movie Podcast of the week.”