Kit Hughes is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, specializing in useful and workplace media, economic education, and histories of technology. Much of her work asks where our ideas about the economy come from, how they circulate, and how they impact our world.

She is author of Television at Work, which explores how business developed television as a workplace technology that could manage the hearts, bodies, and minds of American workers, all while pursuing heightened efficiency and corporate expansion. In addition to excavating forgotten practices like the deployment of CCTV for automating industrial production, using videotape to extend the workday, and creating national and international private satellite networks to deliver morale-boosting executive communications amid crisis, the book argues that expanding our purview beyond commercial and public television requires us to revise core television studies concepts (flow, immediacy, time-shifting, narrowcasting).

Her current book project examines how the small business owner became one of the most cherished figures in U.S. politics and culture, synthesizing examples that range from the National Chamber of Commerce's satellite training seminars to Hallmark Christmas films. She has likewise written on NYSE educational film, public television consumer programming, and the tech industry's promotion of datafied managerialism and employee wearables in the context of professional basketball.

Her research on sponsored film, workplace media, kinescopes, early video formats, and digital humanities methods can be found in a range of journals and edited collections, including Film History, American Quarterly, Media, Culture & Society, Television & New Media, The Arclight Guidebook, Media Industries Journal, and Film Criticism. Her article in American Archivist on cultural studies approaches to appraisal won the 2014 Ernst Posner Award for most outstanding article published by the journal that year.

Hughes has contributed to several media history digital humanities projects, including Unlocking the Airwaves, Project Arclight, Media History Digital Library, and Lantern, the last of which was recognized with the 2014 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. At CSU, Hughes has been awarded the Provost’s 14’er Award for Faculty Excellence (2024) and the College of Liberal Arts Distinction in Curricular Innovation Award (2025). From 2019-2022, She served as lead Humanities Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts, helping to lay the groundwork for the Joe Blake Center for Engaged Humanities. She was also Co-Director of the Center for Engaged Humanities' Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant, previously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (director: Michael Carolan, $500,000). Prior to joining CSU, she taught at Miami University, worked as an archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and volunteered as an AmeriCorps VISTA in Baltimore, Maryland.