Shonni Enelow
Professor of English
Fordham University
924 Leon Lowenstein Building
113 West 60th St NY, NY 10023
senelow@fordham.edu
ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS
2022–present: Professor of English, Fordham University.
2018–2022: Associate Professor of English, Fordham University.
2012–2018: Assistant Professor of English, Fordham University.
EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Ph.D., Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, 2012.
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
B.F.A., Theater, Tisch School of the Arts, 2005.
RESEARCH AWARDS
Modern Drama Prize for Best Article of 2019; Honorable Mention, Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Article Award, 2020, “Sweating Tennessee Williams: Working Actors in A Streetcar Named Desire and Portrait of a Madonna.”
2015-2016 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-Drama.
PUBLISHED BOOKS
Joanna Hogg, University of Illinois Press, 2024. Shonni Enelow analyzes Hogg’s six feature films around the concepts of turning away, the reality effect, and the impossible encounter. Throughout, Enelow explores the tension between absorption, in which characters are immersed in a diegetic fiction, and self-reflexivity, as the filmmaker comments on her techniques of representation. An in-depth interview with Hogg delves into the director’s process, approach to creating character, and use of artistic and literary references.
A Discourse on Method, co-authored with David Levine, 53rd State Press, 2020. A Discourse on Method is a paranoid theory and a counterfactual history of American method acting, conducted in two parts. The first is Shonni Enelow’s account of a journey into the churning guts of the Method archives; the second is David Levine’s monologue Edition of Eight, delivered by an artificial human. Illustrated throughout with spiritual, conspiratorial, and documentary images.
Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama, Northwestern University Press, 2015. Winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, 2015-2016. A cultural and historical analysis of Lee Strasberg’s Method acting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this book analyzes Strasberg’s acting methods through contemporaneous works of American drama, and locates it alongside debates about psychology and psychoanalysis, representations of race and gender, and developments in mass media. Nathan Award citation: “a forceful and timely rethinking of the American theater’s dominant acting theory. In chapters ranging across Broadway and Off Broadway plays, Hollywood and experimental films, and classroom sessions at the Actors Studio, she probes the Method’s assumptions, identifies its blindspots, and tests it against the tumultuous politics of the 1950s and 1960s.”
Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project: A Casebook, co-authored with Una Chaudhuri, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. This co-authored and co-edited volume includes the full text of Carla and Lewis, by Shonni Enelow, as well as essays by Chaudhuri, Enelow, and Fritz Ertl. The book describes The Ecocide Project, a research theatre project by Chaudhuri, Ertl, Enelow, and Josh Hoglund undertaken to explore ecological theater and the representation of climate change, and the process of developing the resulting play, Carla and Lewis.
