Contact Details

Dr. Helen Hanson
	Department(s): English
	Room: 308 (Queen's Building)
	Telephone: +44 (0)1392 264262 (Internal Ext. 4262)	This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
	CV for Helen Hanson. (Adobe Acrobat™ file format – opens in a new window)

Research Interests

• Hollywood Cinema in the Studio Era
• Feminism and Film
• Gender and genre
• Film Aesthetics, particularly Film Sound
• Literary Adaptations on film

My recent research and publications have been focused on female figures in popular American cinema.  My research has been driven by the following questions: How are female figures placed within the popular genres, such as the crime and gothic film?  Why do certain female characters emerge at particular historical moments?  How does the film industry exploit these figures?  What does it mean to talk about ‘male' or ‘female' genres?  What can we learn by looking at the generic histories and affiliations of the crime and gothic film in popular literature? What currency do female characters have within the traditions and development of feminist film theory? I explored these kinds of questions in Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London: I B Tauris, 2007), a book length study that analyses female investigators and gothic heroines in both classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema from the 1940s to the present.  The book incorporates industry and generic histories, theories of narrative, agency and identification to offer fresh perspectives on gender and genre in film noir and the female gothic film.

My wider interest in female figures and their filmic representation informed an international conference: Cherchez La Femme: The Cinematic Femme Fatale, Her History and Transmissions which I co-organised in Exeter, Sept 2-3 2005 (www.english.ex.ac.uk/conferences/cherchez-la-femme.shtml). Contributors at the conference offered perspectives on the transhistorial and transnational presence of the fatal woman in literature, film and visual culture.  I am currently co-editing a collection of essays from the event.

My other current research interests, and publications, have been on the aesthetics and practices of sound in Hollywood cinema 1930-1950, with a particular interest in the relationship between sound, mood and genre, and the sound ‘styles' in different Hollywood studios. 

As well as these research strands I am interested in the material history of cinema, and I use Exeter's Bill Douglas Centre Collection widely in my research, postgraduate and undergraduate teaching. INSERT LINK (http://www.billdouglas.org/)

Publications

Most Representative Publications

• Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London: I B Tauris, 2007), isbn: 1845115619, pp. 256
• "Last Night I dreamt I read Rebecca again: Reading, Watching and Engaging with Rebecca in Fiction and Film" in Helen Taylor ed. The Daphne Du Maurier Companion (London: Virago, 2007), isbn: 978-1-84408-235-3, pp. 305-312
• "From Suspicion (1941) to Deceived (1991): Gothic Continuities, Feminism and Postfeminism in the Neo-Gothic Film" Gothic Studies, Vol. 9, no. 2, Winter, 2007
• "Sound Affects: Post-production Sound, Soundscapes and Sound Design in Hollywood's Studio Era", Music, Sound and the Moving Image Journal, Vol. 1, no. 1, Spring 2007, issn: 1753-0768, pp. 27-49
• Essays on "Psycho", "Disaster Movies of the 1970s" and "Desperately Seeking Susan" in Linda Ruth Williams and Michael Hammond eds. Contemporary American Cinema (Open University Press, 2006), isbn: 9-780-335-218-318, pp. 93-96, 128-131, 304-306
• "Sounds of the City: the Sonic Fabric of Film Noir" in Robynn Stillwell and Peter Franklin eds. The Cambridge Companion to Film Music (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Teaching

I am supervising PhD students researching film sound styles and practices in post-classical American cinema, the history of the thriller genre, and the figure of the ‘rake' in film adaptations.  I would be happy to supervise PhD research on American cinema from the 1930s onwards, questions of gender, industrial and aesthetic histories and film adaptation.