Staff Profile

Sarah Hill is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies and Co-Deputy Head of Media, Culture Heritage. Her work sits at the intersections of feminist media studies and critical disability studies. Her most recent research explores how gender and disability intersect within young women’s use of social media.

Prior to joining Newcastle University, Sarah was the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow on the Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain project at the University of East Anglia, where she was also awarded her PhD in Film and Media in 2016.

Sarah welcomes PhD applications on the following topics:

·     Disability in media and culture

·     Social media

·     Feminist media studies

·     Youth studies

Sarah’s research uses qualitative methods to explore the intersections of gender, race and disability. Her most recent research examines how disabled young women’s self-representation practices are shaped by platform affordances and broader socio-cultural and political discourses of disability. This work has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Girlhood Studies and the Journal of Gender Studies.

Her first monograph, Young Women, Girls and Postfeminism in Contemporary British Film, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2020. The book is the first full-length study of young femininity in British cinema from the early 21^st Century and offers new ways to understand how postfeminism adapts to fit a nationally specific context.

In 2016, Sarah was the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellow on the Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain project at the University of East Anglia in partnership with the East Anglian Film Archive.

Sarah is the module leader on the following modules:

MCH3002 Youth, Identity and Contemporary Media

MCH1026: Social and Cultural Studies

Sarah also supervises UG and PGT dissertations on a variety of topics

Sarah was the Degree Programme Director for BA (Hons) Media, Communication and Cultural Studies from 2020-2024.

• Articles

  • Hill S. Navigating visibility and risk: disabled young women’s self-presentation practices on social media. Journal of Gender Studies 2023, 33(5), 512-523.
  • Hill S. Locating disability within online body positivity discourses: an analysis of #DisabledAndCute. Feminist Media Studies 2023, 23(4), 1311-1326.
  • Hill S, Johnston KM. Making women amateur filmmakers visible: reclaiming women’s work through the film archive. Women's History Review 2020, 29(5), 875-889.
  • Hill S. Exploring Disabled Girls' Self-representational Practices Online. Girlhood Studies 2017, 10(2), 114-130.
  • Hill S. The Ambitious Young Woman and the Contemporary British Sports Film. Assuming Gender 2015, 5(1), 2.

• Authored Book

  • Hill S. Young Women, Girls and Postfeminism in Contemporary British Film. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

• Book Chapter

  • Hill S. (Not) Being the ‘Cool Disabled Person’: Queering / Cripping Postfeminist Girlhood on Social Media. In: Sikka, T; Longstaff, G; Walls, S, ed. Disrupted Knowledge: Scholarship in a Time of Change. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2023, pp.155-173.