User:617calliope/sandbox

Jody Enders (born 22 May 1955 in Washington, D.C.) is an American medievalist, theater historian, theorist of rhetoric, and translator. She is the eldest of four children born to Howard Enders, a documentary filmmaker,[i] and Corinne Enders, a special education teacher. In 1996, she married the Belgian-American physicist, Eric D’Hoker.

Enders received her B.A. in French and Russian Literature (1977) and her M.A. in French (1979) from the University of Virginia before moving on to the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a Ph.D. in Romance Languages (1986).[i] While working on her Ph.D., she took a seminar on the Origins of Medieval Drama with O.B. Hardison, Jr. and E. Catherine Dunn at the Folger Shakespeare Library. This later inspired her first book, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Cornell, 1992) at the same time that the experience gave rise to a long and meaningful relationship with the Folger. In 2020, Enders established a fund in her name, the purpose of which is “to support and encourage scholarly inquiry at the Folger in the areas of theater, rhetoric, Romance and/or Arabic studies, or performance in the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods with a special emphasis on cultures outside of Britain.”[ii]

Enders launched her career with four books on the history, theory, and performance of the medieval theater. After Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama won the inaugural Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Award in French and Francophone Literature from the Modern Language Association, she penned The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Cornell, 1999) and Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago, 2002), the latter winning the Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society of Theatre Research and which was supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. After completing Murder by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (Chicago, 2009), she turned next to the translation and performance of broad comedy with The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries (Penn, 2011). Terry Jones of Monty Python praised the farces as “a real discovery that goes a long way to readjusting our perception of the Middle Ages. Enders is a great champion of comedy at its most vulgar and hilarious…. She is unafraid to reference modern comedy in her translations and insists on the primacy of performance in assessing these comedies from half a millennium ago."[i] She published two more anthologies with Penn: Holy Deadlock (2017) and Immaculate Deception (2022). To make additional plays more accessible,[ii] Enders next moved her series to the University of Michigan Press with Trial by Farce.

Having begun her academic career at the University of Illinois, Chicago, she joined the Department of French and Italian of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1992, where she is Distinguished Professor of French.[i] Among many contributions at UCSB, she founded the Public Speaking Initiative, an interdisciplinary effort devoted to effective oral communication, which she ran until passing the torch to her Co-Director, Professor Annika Speer at the University of California, Riverside. She also served as editor of Theatre Survey and has edited two volumes on theater: A Cultural History of Theatre (Bloomsbury, 2017) and, with Carol Symes, Theresa Coletti, and John Sebastian, A Cultural History of Tragedy (Bloomsbury, 2020). [i] https://ucsb.academia.edu/JodyEnders/CurriculumVitae [i] https://www.pennpress.org/9780812222517/the-farce-of-the-fart-and-other-ribaldries/

[ii] Trial by Farce (Michigan, 2023): xi-xiv. [i] https://www.frit.ucsb.edu/people/jody-enders

[ii] https://www.folger.edu/blogs/folger-story/donor-spotlight-jody-enders/ [i] https://www.emmys.com/bios/howard-enders