Emma Wilson has research interests in contemporary visual culture. She has written on children and cinema in her 2003 volume Cinema's Missing Children, in her 2021 monograph Céline Sciamma: Portraits and in a series of essays on representations of children in the work of women filmmakers. She has written on uses of cinema in contexts of intimate and historical responses to loss and pain, in her 2021 monograph Love, Mortality and the Moving Image, in her studies of directors Alain Resnais and Atom Egoyan, and in her ongoing writing on the work of Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. Her 2019 book The Reclining Nude explored the work of contemporary women filmmakers and photographers working in Paris, including Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat and Nan Goldin. It will be followed by a further monograph, Maternal Eroticism, Feminist Vision, on which she is currently working. She has plans in the future to work on the films of Alice Rohrwacher. She writes regularly on French and Italian film for Film Quarterly.  

Professor Wilson welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to her interests.