Hilary Radner is Emeritus Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Otago and author of three monographs that form a trilogy addressing the formation of feminine identity at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century as it is manifested in a nexus of media forms: Shopping Around: Consumer Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure (Routledge, 1995), Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture (Routledge, 2011), and The New Woman's Film: Femme-centric Movies for Smart Chicks (Routledge, 2017).
Her research interests revolve around understanding the representations of gender and identity in contemporary visual culture, particularly in terms of how these evolve over time in relation to second wave feminism. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on cinema, visual culture and gender: these range in topic from film melodrama, make-up, fashion photography and women's magazines to, more recently, the woman's film, cinema and fashion, celebrity culture, the contemporary bromance, New Zealand fashion, Hollywood film genres, New Zealand cinema, World Cinema and French cinema.
Her publications also include seven co-edited volumes: Film Theory Goes to the Movies (Routledge, 1993); Constructing the New Consumer Society (Macmillan, 1997); Swinging Single Representing Sexuality in the 1960s (U of Minnesota P, 1999); Jane Campion: Cinema , Nation, Identity (Wayne State UP, 2009); New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past (Intellect/University of Chicago 2011); Feminism at the Movies: Understanding Gender in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge, 2011); A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema (Wiley/Blackwell, 2015). Her most recent project Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image, which explores the work of this important film theorist, is in production with Edinburgh UP. She is currently working on a monograph addressing the place of the woman's film in New Zealand cinema, a topic on which she has published a number of articles over the past ten years.