Shonni Enelow

My research explores performance across media in and after modernism, engaging topics in modern and contemporary theory including psychoanalysis, visual art theory, media theory, and theories of spectatorship. At Fordham, I teach modern drama, theater and performance studies, and literary and cultural theory.

Most of my scholarship focuses on realist acting, and starts from the premise that realist acting is a crucial aesthetic form of modernity and speaks to fundamental questions of power, difference, separation, and attachment. This argument is a throughline of all my published work, from my first monograph Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psycho-drama (Northwestern University Press, 2015) to my recent book Joanna Hogg (Contemporary Film Directors, University of Illinois Press, 2024).

Joanna Hogg reads Joanna Hogg’s films through the concept of absorption, drawing from the ideas of art historian Michael Fried and psychoanalytic theorist Joan Copjec. Addressing an interdisciplinary readership, this book explores Hogg’s cinematic strategies of absorption, situating them within key paradigms of realism and modernism. Method Acting and Its Discontents, which won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism in 2016, was the first scholarly analysis of method acting to situate it in its mid-century cultural context and alongside readings of drama and film. The book theorizes method acting alongside its connection to psychoanalysis and by examining its role in debates about race, psychology, and representation. The Nathan Award committee described it as “a forceful and timely rethinking of the American theater’s dominant acting theory.”

My dual focus on theater and film is one of my key interventions as a scholar and critic. I began writing for Film Comment in 2016 with an article called “The Great Recession: American Film Acting Today.” The Atlantic and Buzzfeed put my article on their lists of exceptional works of journalism from that year, and the article has been cited widely. My film writing has recently appeared in Reverse Shot, Criterion, and MUBI Notebook, among other venues.

I have co-written two books, both of which emerged from artistic collaborations. The first is my casebook co-written with Una Chaudhuri to document and theorize a project we undertook in 2010–2011 investigating theatrical representations of climate change. Our book Research Theatre, Climate Change, and the Ecocide Project (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) includes the play I wrote for that collaboration. A Discourse on Method (53rd State Press, 2020) also emerged from an ongoing collaboration with visual and performance artist David Levine.

Additionally, my scholarship has appeared in ELH, Modern Drama, Theater Survey, Theatre Topics, and Theater. My Modern Drama article “Sweating Tennessee Williams: Working Actors in A Streetcar Named Desire and Portrait of a Madonna,” which reads Williams’ plays for their representations of labor, won the Modern Drama Prize in 2019 for best article of the year and received an Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in 2020.

I am currently working on a book that theorizes realist acting through visual art.