Suzanne Leonard
- Name
- Title
- Assistant Professor
- Phone
- 617-521-2544
- Fax
- 617-521-3199
- Office
- 300 The Fenway - C-301D , MA
- suzanne.leonard@simmons.edu
Suzanne Leonard is Assistant Professor of English, with specialties in Film Studies, Women's Literature and Media, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies, and Ethnic Fiction. Professor Leonard earned her Ph.D. in 2005 after completing a dissertation entitled, "Scarlet Women: Unfaithful Wives in Contemporary Feminism, Fiction, and Film." In this work, she argues that though unfaithful women invite cultural anxiety, they often garner feminist admiration because of the public challenge they pose to the marital institution. An excerpt of this project appears in the anthology Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2007). At Simmons, Professor Leonard regularly teaches classes on film, literary theory, and gender studies, and advises students in the English department, the Women's and Gender Studies department, and in the college's Gender and Cultural Studies Master's program.
Professor Leonard's current research project is a book-length study of the 1987 film Fatal Attraction, which will be an inaugural text in Blackwell's series Studies in Film and Television. Her work on feminism and popular culture has also appeared in Women's and Gender Studies Quarterly and MELUS, as well as in various anthologies including Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Wayne State UP, 2008) and Feminism, Domesticity, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2008).
Professor Leonard has supervised Master's projects on topics such as cultural trauma in post 9/11 torture films, queer identities in diasporic Israeli cinema, and pornography and masculinity in recent American independent film.
Publications
"Ready-Maid Postfeminism: Assessing the Figure of the Domestic in Contemporary American Cinema." Feminism, Domesticity, and Popular Culture. Ed. Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows. New York: Routledge, 2008.
"The 'True Love' of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton." Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History. Ed. Vicki Callahan. Wayne State University Press, 2008.
"When Whiteness Turns to Blackness: White Women's Marital Betrayals in Colonial Settings." At Home and Abroad: Whiteness in Performance, Literature, and Popular Culture. Ed. LaVinia Jennings. Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol 44. University of Tennessee Press, 2008.
"'I Hate My Job, I Hate Everybody Here': Adultery, Boredom and the Working Girl in Twenty-First Century American Cinema." Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. Eds. Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker. Duke University Press, 2007
"Marriage Envy." Women's and Gender Studies Quarterly. Spec. Issue on Envy. Ed. Jane Gallop.
34.3&4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 43-64.
Entries on Gish Jen's A Typical American and Frank Chin's Donald Duk for Student's Companion to American Literary Characters. Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2006.
"Dreaming as Cultural Work in Donald Duk and Dreaming in Cuban." MELUS 29.2 (Summer 2004): 181-203.
"Playing in the Shadows: Aging and Female Invisibility in Lessing's The Summer Before the Dark." Coming to Age. Spec. Issue of Doris Lessing Studies 24.1-2 (Summer / Fall 2004): 11-15.
Entry on Lorna Landvik for the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twenty-First Century American Novelists. Vol. 292. Columbia, SC: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2004. 215-221.
Presentations
"Separate Spheres, Gun-Toting Women, and Mad Men: Television's Recent Reimaginings of the Gender Wars." Console-ing Passions International Conference on Television, Audio, Video, New Media, and Feminism. Santa Barbara, CA. May 2008.
"Melodrama Meets Mode: Ugly Betty's Generic Revisions." Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Convention. Philadelphia, PA. March 2008.
"Fatal Attraction, Postfeminism, and the Popular Culture Classroom." Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association National Conference. Boston, MA. April 2007.
"She Works Too Hard: Postfeminism's Exploited Female Workers." Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Convention. Chicago, IL. March 2007.
"Why is Wisteria Lane Reading Flaubert?: Emma Bovary As Icon." Console-ing Passions International Conference on Television, Audio, Video, New Media, and Feminism.
Milwaukee, WI. June 2006.
"Prematurely Gray: The 'Post-Sexual' Married Thirtysomething of Recent Cinema." Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Convention. Vancouver, Canada. March 2006.
"Missing Out on Motherhood, Or, Where the Career Girl Went Wrong." Midwest Modern Language Association Conference. Milwaukee, WI. November 2005.
"Her Cheating Heart: Extramarital Affairs in Women's Liberation Fiction." National Women's and Gender Studies Association Annual Conference. Milwaukee, WI. June 2004.
"Sex and the Bored Woman Worker in Twenty-First Century American Cinema." Interrogating Post-Feminism: Gender and The Politics of Popular Culture. Norwich, UK. April 2004.
"Unfaithful to What?: Adultery as an Ethical Articulation in Jhabvala's Heat and Dust."
Midwest Modern Language Association Conference. Chicago, IL. November 2003.
"Bourdieu in the Writing Classroom: Some Pedagogical Implications of Bourdieu's Work." Conference on College Composition and Communication, New York, NY. March 2003.
"Performing the Real: The 'True Love' of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton." Society for Cinema and Media Studies Annual Convention. Minneapolis, MN. March 2003.
Teaching Areas & Topics
- Introduction to Film
- Feminist Film Theory
- Literary Theory
- Film Genre
- Women and Film
- Women in Literature
Research
- Film Studies
- Women's Literature and Media
- Feminist Theory
- Cultural Studies
- Ethnic American Fiction
Affiliations
- Society for Cinema and Media Studies
- Modern Language Association
- Cultural Studies Association
Education
Doctor of Philosophy
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Master of Arts
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Bachelor of Arts
Dartmouth College