Michele Aaron did her first degree in Literature at QMW, University of London, and both her MA in Culture and Social Change, and PhD on Contemporary Film and Fiction, at Southampton University. Previously, she taught film studies at Brunel University, where she co-edited the online journal EnterText.

She has written a book on film theory and the pleasures and ethics of Spectatorship and has edited two collections of essays, one on Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, the other a Reader on New Queer Cinema. Her articles include work on spectatorship, Cinema’s ‘queer Jews’, and cinematic fiction

• Introduction to Film Studies
• Film Theory Politics
• Death and the Moving Image

I have supervised to completion PhD and MPhil students on a broad range of topics.

I currently have PhD students working on Fatherhood in 1990s Hollywood, the Psychiatric Institution in Cinema and Self-representation in contemporary artists' moving image work through a queer-theory framework.

I welcome research proposals that fall within my broad research interests but am open to suggestions on related topics.

Death and the moving image

I am currently completing a major study entitled Death and the Moving Image: Ideology, Iconography and I. This monograph considers the various forms and functions of the spectre of death, of cinematic death itself and of grief, in Western cinema and explores their relationship to narrative, ideology and spectatorship. The book will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2012.

Death and visual culture

In 2009, I ran an international multi-disciplinary conference on this theme which emerged out of collaboration with the ‘End of Life’ Head of the West Midlands’ NHS. As a result of this event, I have put together an edited collection drawn from a selection of the papers presented. The book will be entitled Envisaging Death: Dying and Visual Culture.

Queer theory/texts

I have an ongoing interest in theories of gender and sexuality, especially as they interact with the construction of Jewishness and race more broadly. I have published and presented a series of pieces on the intersection of queerness and Jewishness. Grounded in the discourses of race and gender of late nineteenth century Europe, these explore Hollywood, European and Yiddish film and history, and more recently television.

Ethics and film theory 

My previous work on the ‘ethics of spectatorship’ has progressed into a questioning of the racialised or imperial, or simply partial, assumptions underlying philosophically informed Western film criticism which addresses the dynamics of watching the suffering of others. While such a questioning underlies my other research projects, it represents a future and more transnational trajectory of my work.

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Books

• Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (Wallflower;  2007) Distributed by Columbia University Press in US.

Edited books

• Ed. The Body’s Perilous Pleasures (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
• Ed. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2004)

Edited journal

• Ed. “Text < - > Screen” EnterText 1.2 (Spring/Summer 2001)

Journal articles

• “(Fill-in-the) Blank Fiction: Dennis Cooper's Cinematics and the Complicitous Reader” Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 27, no. 3 (Winter 2004)
• “Pass/Fail: Screen Debate on Boys Don’t Cry” Screen Vol.42, no. 1 (March 2001)
• “The Queer Jew: From Yidl to Yentl and Back Again” Jewish History and Culture Vol. 3, no. 1 (Summer 2000)
• "The Historical, the Hysterical and the Homoeopathic" Paragraph Vol.19, no.2 (Summer 1996)

Book chapters

• '‘Looking On and Looking the Other Way: Hotel Rwanda and the Racialised Ethics of Spectatorship’ in James Walters and Tom Brown, Film Moments (London: BFI: 2010)
•  ‘The New Queer Jew: Jewishness, Masculinity and Contemporary Film’ in Harry Brod, Shawn Zevit.  Brothers Keepers: New Jewish Masculinities  (Men Studies’ Press, 2010)
• From Complacency to Culpability: Conflict & Death in post 9.11 Film' in Mei Renyi & Fu Meirong, eds., Changes and Continuities: the United States after 9.11, Beijing: World Affairs Press, 2009. Chinese Language
• ‘Towards Queer Television Theory: Bigger Pictures sans the Sweet Queer-After’ in Glyn Davis and Gary Needham, Queer TV (Routledge, 2008)
• ‘Pass/Fail: Screen Debate on Boys Don’t Cry’ in Jackie Stacey and Sarah Street, eds., The Queer Screen: A Screen Reader on Queer Cinema (Routledge, 2007)  Reprint
•  ‘New Queer Cinema’ in Linda Ruth Williams and Mike Hammond, eds., American Cinema Since 1960 (Open University Press, 2006)
•  ‘New Queer Cable: The L Word, the Small Screen and the Bigger Picture’ in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds., The L Word (London: I B Taurus, 2006)
• ‘Looking On: The Spectacle of Death and the Complicitous Reader’ Spectacle of the Real (Intellect Press, 2004)
• ‘The Queer Jew: Masculinity and Yiddish Cinema’ in Phil Powrie, Bruce Babbington and Ann Davies, eds., The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2004)
• “New Queer Cinema” and “The New Queer Spectator” in Aaron, ed. New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh University Press, 2004)
• “Hardly Chazans: Yentl and the Singing Jew” in Bill Marshall and Robynn Stilwell, eds. Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond (Intellect Press, 2000)
• “‘Til Death Us Do Part: Cinema’s Queer Couples Who Kill” in Aaron, ed. The Body’s Perilous Pleasures (Edinburgh University Press, 1999)
• “The Blunt Cutting Edge: Taking the Knife to the Body of Evidence” in Deborah Cartmell, Ian Hunter and Heidi Kaye, eds. Sisterhoods: Feminists in Film and Fiction (Pluto Press, 1998