Hilary Neroni

BIO

Hilary Neroni came to the University of Vermont in 1999 after receiving her PhD from the School of Cinematic Arts at University of Southern California. Neroni’s books and articles engage the nature of ideology as it is represented in film, television, and other media. She considers how cultural trends reveal current anxieties and desires of the society at large.

In recent writings, for example, she has investigated the role of violence in film and on television. In The Violent Woman, she considers how violence defines gender in American contemporary film and reveals that the violent woman’s disruption of the traditional romance plot lays bare the ideological expectations that gender is complementary. Additionally in The Subject of Torture, she engages the proliferation of scenes of torture—one of the newest trends of violence—on prime time television and in film after September 11, 2001. Here, she argues that this violence reveals the culture’s dependence on the ideology of biopower.

Neroni’s writing has also long been concerned with feminism and women directors, and this comes to fruition in her Feminist Film Theory and Cléo from 5 to 7—a book geared more toward undergraduate and graduate classes—which explains feminist film theory (as well as its intersection with Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory) in the first half and then analyzes the film through that theory in the second half. Many of her articles also engage women directors such as Claire Denis, Julie Dash, and Judith Helfand.

Neroni teaches classes in many of the areas offered through the Film and Television Studies program. She specializes in classes that have a theoretical component and especially in linking theory to practice, whether that’s the practice of analyzing films or the practice of making films. She is a passionate teacher who sees the classroom as a site of true engagement.

Courses

• Film and Television Theory 
• Film and Television Genre and Auteur 
• Dev Motion Pct I: Origin-1930
• Dev Motion Pct II: 1930-1960
• Dev Motion Pct III: 1960-2000 
• Intro to Film and Television Special Topics: Lane Film Series 
• Psychoanalysis Film 
• Readings and Reserch 
• Seminar in Film and Television
• Theory and Practice 
• History of Television 
• Theory and Practice: Montage
• Autobiography: Theory and Practice 
• Contemporary Topics in Film and Television: Women in Film 
• Global Cinema
• Documentary Film
• Film Criticism  
• American Film Genres: The Horror Film

Publications

Hilary Neroni Publications (DOCX)

Awards and Achievements

• Winner of the 2016 Peter C. Rollins Book Prize, NEPCA / ACA Northeast Popular / American Culture Association. For The Subject is Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press)
• Honorable Mention, Best Monograph Award, BAFTSS (British Association for Film, Television, and Screen Studies). For The Subject is Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and Film (Columbia University Press)

Area(s) of expertise

Film and media theory, representations of gender and race, violence in film and on television, Women directors, documentary film/video, Feminist theory, psychoanalytic cultural theory and Marxism.