About

Kristen Hatch is an Associate Professor in the Film & Media Studies program within the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in Film, Television, and Digital Media, earned in 2006, and a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Smith College. Her research interests encompass Classical Hollywood, American Film History, and the histories of race, gender, and sexuality, with a particular focus on cultural studies, stardom, and childhood and girlhood studies. Hatch has contributed extensively to the field through her publications, which include books such as 'Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood' (2015) and ongoing projects like 'New Hollywood Girlhoods' and 'Hollywood Stardom and the Transition to Sound.' Her scholarly work also features numerous book chapters, journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and web publications that explore topics like Hollywood voice culture, child sexuality in celebrity culture, and the representation of women and childhood in media. She is an active member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and continues to shape discussions on film history and cultural studies through her research and publications.

Research topics

• Art
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• Aesthetics
• Biology
• Visual arts
• Philosophy
• Law
• Medicine
• Epistemology
• Art history
• Genetics
• Psychology

Selected publications

• The cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: twenty-six short essays on a working star

  Celebrity Studies · 2025-03-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Hollywood Learned to Speak

  Routledge eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Art history

  Hollywood's transition to sound brought to a head the question of what Americans ought to sound like. This was not only a matter of diction but of vocal quality—pitch, tone, and timbre—as well. In the 1920s, as film stars were developing the art of silent-film acting, linguists and vocal experts were busy codifying the ideals of the modern, implicitly white, American voice. Voice culturists differed as to the specific techniques for achieving an ideal voice. However, they agreed that it should be characterized by vocal control that could only be achieved through hard work and scientific knowledge reflective of American modernity. Discourse on voice culture shaped the promotion and reception of the stars' voices when the Hollywood studios made their transition to sound. And prominent proponents of the new voice culture were recruited to help the studios' contract players cultivate voices that reflected these ideals. While popular memory may dwell on the ways in which the coming of sound disrupted the careers of silent-era stars, far more significant were the ways in which the soundtrack helped to standardize American speech around a set of practices that emerged out of a very specific vision of American modernity.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘A woman’s face and a child’s body’: Brooke Shields and child sexuality

  Celebrity Studies · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  In the 1970s, child actress and model Brooke Shields became a flashpoint for the crisis over child sexuality and paedophilia. Shields’s disturbing marriage of a child’s body with a womanly face disrupted the iconography of childhood that had flourished since the Enlightenment and pointed towards a new paradigm that has become more prominent in the decades since. This article examines how child liberationist views that children are sexual beings helped to shape Shields’s public image as an object of adult male desire, even as her celebrity became a vector for the emerging feminist argument that children must be protected from adult desire. Through discourse about Shields, artists, journalists, and others articulated opposing logics for understanding the newly sexualised child and helped lay the foundation for contemporary debates about children in visual culture.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 3. Lillian Gish: Clean, and White, and Pure as the Lily

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Biology
  • Genetics
  PublisherDOI

• 21. Judith Butler: Sex, Gender, and Subject Formation

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-08-22 · 26 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In the 1930s, Shirley Temple was heralded as “America’s sweetheart,” and she remains the icon of wholesome American girlhood, but Temple’s films strike many modern viewers as perverse. Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood examines her early career in the context of the history of girlhood and considers how Temple’s star image emerged out of the Victorian cult of the child. Beginning her career in “Baby Burlesks,” short films where she played vamps and harlots, her biggest hits were marketed as romances between Temple and her adult male costars. Kristen Hatch helps modern audiences make sense of the erotic undercurrents that seem to run through these movies. Placing Temple’s films in their historical context and reading them alongside earlier representations of girlhood in Victorian theater and silent film, Hatch shows how Shirley Temple emerged at the very moment that long standing beliefs about childhood innocence and sexuality were starting to change. Where we might now see a wholesome child in danger of adult corruption, earlier audiences saw Temple’s films as demonstrations of the purifying power of childhood innocence. Hatch examines the cultural history of the time to view Temple’s performances in terms of sexuality, but in relation to changing views about gender, class, and race. Filled with new archival research, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood enables us to appreciate the “simpler times” of Temple’s stardom in all its thorny complexity.

  PublisherDOI

• Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema

  Journal of American History · 2019-12-13 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 7. Mildred Pierce: From Script to Screen

  University of Texas Press eBooks · 2018-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 3. Mae West: The Constant Sinner

  University of Texas Press eBooks · 2017-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cutting Women: Margaret Booth and Hollywood’s Pioneering Female Film Editors

  2013-01-01 · 11 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In 1926, the Los Angeles Times informed readers that “one of the most important positions in the motion-picture industry is held almost entirely by women” whose job it was to assemble “thousands of feet of film so that it tells an interesting story in the most straightforward manner” (B7). Assembling reels and cutting negatives was tedious work that often fell to young working-class women. However, out of the ranks of these film joiners and negative cutters emerged a handful of women who would help to develop the editing techniques that would become the hallmark of Hollywood’s visual style.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Peter Elsner

  SRH Wald-Klinikum Gera

  1 shared

• W. Wigger-Alberti

  1 shared