Jody Enders

Distinguished Professor of French and Theater and Director of the PSI

Specialization

For Jody Enders, it’s all about the rhetoric of practice and the practice of rhetoric.  She is the author of four books on the rhetoric of the medieval theater: Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (1992), winner of the inaugural Scaglione Prize from the Modern Language Association for the best book in French and Francophone Studies; The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty (1999); Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (2002), winner of the Barnard Hewitt Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research; and Murder by Accident (2010). More recently, she has turned to the great fifteenth-century French farces, translating two dozen of the best in two books of performance-friendly literary translations destined for medievalists, historians, theater practitioners, and classic comedy lovers: The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English (2011), which was praised by none other than Terry Jones of Monty Python; and Holy Deadlock and Further Ribaldries: A Second Dozen Medieval French Plays in Modern English (2017). A past editor of Theatre Survey and Guggenheim fellow, she has published numerous essays on the interplay of rhetoric, medieval literature, performance theory, and the law.