Pat Gill
Contact Information
Office: 232 Gregory Hall
Telephone: (217) 244-1414
Email: patgill@uiuc.edu
Associate Professor; Joint
appointment in Gender and Women's Studies
Bio
Pat Gill's primary areas of interest are film and media theory; feminist theory and gender studies; cultural and popular cultural studies; psychoanalytic theory and contemporary theories of interpretation. She explores the interpretive and affective force of written and visual media, especially that of popular films and television, investigating the reasons why audiences find these media entertaining and how they entertain. Employing psychoanalytic concepts of human understanding as well as discursive theories about the ways in which meaning is formed, she studies visual language and narrative to consider the social and psychological implications of the industrial production of pleasure. Her courses in film and television and in critical cultural studies examine the ways in which the media can be seen to help to construct and reinforce as well as to be constructed by reigning conceptions of class, race, gender, and sexuality. In bringing contemporary interpretive theories to bear on media constructions, images, and responses, Professor Gill analyzes the cultural assumptions informing each production -- the cryptic, accepted allusions to a knowledge not within the frame of the picture that allows comprehension of a scene or image or the determination of a meaning.
Professor Gill has written on feminism, film, families, and filth. Her recent research concerns the construction of masculinity in certain films after 1990; the power and passion of rhetorical restraint in 18th-Century English literature; and the portrayal of benevolent patriarchs in early television programs.
Curriculum Vitae
Experience
- Gender criticism, feminist and queer theories, psychoanalytic film theory, media analysis, cultural studies.
Education
- Ph.D., Cornell University
Selected Publications
Gill, Pat. (forthcoming in an edited collection). Making a killing in the marketplace: Incorporation as a monstrous process. University of Wisconsin Press.
Gill, Pat. (2003). Taking it personally: Male suffering in 8MM. Camera Obscura, 52, 157-187
Gill, Pat. (2002). Apprehending criminals: Genre and iInterpretation in seven. Cultural Studies -
Critical Methodologies, 2, 47-68
Gill, Pat. The monstrous years: Teens, slasher films, and the family. Journal of Popular Film and Video, 54, 16-30
Gill, Pat. (1999). Technostalgia: Making the future past perfect. Camera Obscura, 40-41, 163-79.