Professor of Media
Email: a.hill@wmin.ac.uk

Biography

Annette Hills research focuses on media audiences. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to study television, film and new media audiences. Her work focuses on questions concerning genre, media and everyday life, and dynamic and creative reception practices.

Her last book, Restyling Factual TV (Routledge 2007), is about understanding genres in relation to each other and in relation to popular audiences. It takes as a starting point the idea that factual television is being restyled, that various kinds of news, current affairs, documentary and popular factual genres are part of a turbulent time in broadcasting.

The boundaries between fact and fiction have been pushed to the limits in various popular factual formats, the cross pollination of styles increasing the pace of change in news, current affairs, or documentary. What happens if we look at factual television from the position of the viewer? Using multimethod research with representative samples of British and Swedish audiences, a picture emerges of a viewer navigating its way through a busy, noisy, and constantly changing factual television environment.

She is currently researching interactive media audiences. Her next book Spirit TV is about audience responses to psychic investigations such as Most Haunted.

She is the author of Shocking Entertainment: Viewer Response to Violent Movies (1997), co-author of TV Living: Television, Audiences and Everyday Life (with David Gauntlett 1999), as well as a variety of articles on audiences and popular culture. She is the co-editor (with Robert C Allen) of The Television Studies Reader (Routledge 2003) and author of Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (Routledge 2005).

Hills profile in television and cultures of viewing also includes chapters in Reading Makeover Television (with Dover, 2007), Blackwell Companion to Television (2006), Critical Readings (2006),Young People, Soap Operas and Reality TV (2005), Big Brother International (2004), Ill Effects (2001); articles in Journal of Risk Analysis, Journalism and Communication Studies Review, and Cultural Trends (with Weibull and Nilsson).

She published two reports on Swedish television audiences (with Weibull and Nilsson 2005).

Hill leads a HEIF-funded collaborative project on interactive audiences and design with Brunel University (125,000, 2005-09) which will result in industry led events and academic articles.

She has been a Research Fellow at the British Film Institute (1996-98), and at Media Management and Transformation Centre, Jnkping International Business School, Sweden, (2004- 2005). She has been a Visiting Professor at Stockholm University (2004) and Lund University (2007), Sweden, University of Helsinki, Finland (2005 and 2007).

Annette Hill is also Executive Board Member of the European Communication, Research and Education Association (ECREA). She was an executive board member of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA), where she helped to set up the first Postgraduate Network in the UK.

Selected Publications

(2007) Restyling Factual TV: the Reception of News, Documentary, and Reality Genres, London: Routledge, 280 pp.

(2005) Swedish Factual and Reality Television Audiences, with Lennart Weibull and Asa Nilsson, Jonkoping International Business School Research Reports No 2005-4: 88pp.

(2005) Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television, London: Routledge, 231pp.

(2003) Television Studies Reader (co-editor Robert C Allen), London and New York: Routledge, 629pp.

(1999) TV Living: Television, Audiences and Everyday Life (co-authored with David Gauntlett), London: Routledge: 315pp.

(1997) Shocking Entertainment: Viewer Response to Violent Movies, London: John Libbey Media, University of Luton:131pp.

PhD Supervision

Annette Hill currently supervises research students working on the production of digital interactive media, the reception of tabloid newspapers in Britain and Germany, and the reception of Chinese television drama. Her previous students have conducted research on online social communication in Thailand, the reception of tabloid newspapers in Britain, childrens media and everyday life in the Japanese overseas community in London.

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