Her first book, The Intimate Life of Computers: Digitizing Domesticity in the 1980s (University of Minnesota Press, 2024), constructs a history of the spread of computing into domestic spaces in the US in the 1980s. It demonstrates the many surprising ways that women’s culture and feminist critique of the companionate family shaped the history of computing despite a male-dominated computer culture. The book focuses on instances in which users were encouraged to conduct familial relationships with and through computers and reveals how computers were integrated into the most intimate aspects of family life. Through discussions of therapeutic software that helped couples manage romance and sex, adult sex-themed games that critiqued new norms of masculinity, and microprocessor-powered dolls and robots that supported parental care, The Intimate Life of Computers shows how some computing technologies were designed and framed as media that could sustain the heteronormative middle-class American family as it was facing new challenges in the 1980s, especially those related to shifting patterns of labor and leisure.

Hilu is currently working on her second book project, “Gaming Therapy: A History of Psychological and Therapeutic Games.” This project examines how games and gameplay came to be so pervasive in psychological practice and in popular therapeutic cultures, especially since WWII, where they have served as therapeutic tools and as metaphors for healthy and unhealthy forms of relating. This project will demonstrate that games have long been tools to model new ways of relating because they provide therapists with characteristics associated with effective diagnosis and treatment of relationship dynamics. The historical and interdisciplinary approach of the book looks beyond the mainstream culture of video gaming to construct a more expansive repertoire to include in game history – including play therapy, therapeutic board games, mental health apps, digital and VR games, and AI companion chatbots. Focusing on these examples reveals a way of conceptualizing games not as representations or as simulations but as structures that make different relationship dynamics possible.

Hilu teaches courses on digital media theory, television history, cultural studies approaches to popular media, girls’ media and popular culture, and video games. She welcomes undergraduate and graduate advisees looking for research support on projects related to digital and social media, television culture, and therapeutic media.