Neal M. King

Neal King, PhD studies gender in popular culture, with a focus on two fields: men’s accounts of their aging, and Hollywood storytelling about violent heroism. Most of his research centers around cop movies and television shows with male heroes, and then interview research with middle-aged men as they figure out how to grow old in a world that sells anti-aging products to them.

His first two books delved into violent heroism in Hollywood movies. The third focused on controversies over the release of The Passion of the Christ in 2004. The most recent book, co-authored with doctoral students at Virginia Tech, looks at current trends in gender inequality on popular screens. Most of his journal articles and chapters look either at slices of popular cinema and television, or at men’s accounts of their aging process.

Dr. King's journal articles include smaller studies of cinema and television, and then his cooperative work in feminist gerontology on aging men, an international collaboration with Toni Calasanti, Virginia Tech; Ilkka Pietilä, University of Helsinki; and Hanna Ojala, Tampere University, Finland.

His current work focuses on mean girl movies from Hollywood and the production of a century of cop cinema and television.