School of Creative Arts, Film and Media (SCAFM)

Underpinned by specialization in critical, cultural and film theory, my principal research and teaching is within the fields of film, media, cultural and fiction studies.  I have published on a range of subjects that share a concern for the historical conditions that shape the production, circulation and consumption of cultural texts: historiographical methodology is of central importance to my approach to issues of spectatorship, audience, genre, stardom, narrative, pleasure and politics. Published articles and chapters have addressed questions of feminist epistemologies of film spectatorship, sexual ‘post-feminist’ identities within contemporary women’s magazines, intertexuality, gender and mediated representation, the meaning of the early film roles of Marilyn Monroe for star studies, erotic fiction for women, postmodern cinema and the historical relations between women's fiction and Hollywood film adaptations.

Original primary archival research into 1930s crime film cycles resulted in a co-edited volume Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (Rutgers UP) that includes research into the lost history of female-addressed gangster cycles of Hollywood in the 1930s. I am currently expanding this work into a book-length study provisionally entitled Marked women: women, crime and desire in American film 1927-39. 

The recent publication of an article 'Why Film Noir? Hollywood adaptation, and women’s writing in the 1940s and 1950s' substantiates my interest in the industrial and commercial aspects of Hollywood production, and outlines my further research into the interconnectivity of film, fiction and screen adaptation in the work of American women pulp/genre/middlebrow writers 1930-58.

Current Research

Books^{[Back to top]}

Sonnet, E. (In preparation). The Gender of Noir: Hollywood  and adaptation of women's crime writing in the 1940s and 50s.

Sonnet, E. (In preparation). Marked women: women, crime and desire in American film 1929-39.

Articles^{[Back to top]}

Sonnet, E. (In preparation). Time-ripen’d talents: stardom, performativity and the decline of classical Hollywood in the British aging actress cycle 1964-74. Celebrity Studies.

Sonnet, E. (In preparation). The uncanny maternal: lone mothers in Hollywood's ‘Lost Child’ cycle.

Publications^{[Back to top]}

Publications since 2008 [IR]

Co-edited Books^{[Back to top]}

Sonnet, E., Grieveson, L. & Stanfield, P. (Eds.). (2005). Mob Culture: hidden histories of the American gangster film. New York: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0813535579.

Journal Articles^{[Back to top]}

Sonnet, E. (1999). Erotic fiction by women for women: the pleasures of post-feminist heterosexuality. Sexualities: Studies in Culture and Society, 2 (2), 167-187.

Chapter in Books^{[Back to top]}

Sonnet, E. (In press). You only live once: remaking crime as desire in the films of Sylvia Sidney, 1930-37. In J. Olsson & K. Bolton (Eds.), Rethinking American Studies (pp. 00-00). Stockholm: University of Columbia/Wallflower.

Sonnet, E. (2005). Ladies love brutes: reclaiming the lost pleasures of female-addressed gangster films 1929-31. In L. Grieveson, E. Sonnet & P. Stanfield (Eds.), Mob Culture: hidden histories of the American gangster film (pp. 93-119). New York: Rutgers University Press.

Sonnet, E., Grieveson, L. & Stanfield, P. (2005). Introduction. In E. Sonnet, L. Grieveson & P. Stanfield (Eds.), Mob Culture: hidden histories of the American gangster film (pp. 1-10). New York: Rutgers University Press.

Sonnet, E. & Stanfield, P. (2005). ‘Can I check your hats please?’ Genre, masculinity and the retro gangster films of the 1990s. In L. Grieveson, E. Sonnet & P. Stanfield (Eds.), Mob Culture: hidden histories of the American gangster film (pp. 163-184). New York: Rutgers University Press.

Sonnet, E.  (2002). Just a book: refiguring ethnography for the female readers of popular erotic fiction. In W. Brooker & D. Jermyn (Eds.), Audiences: a reader (pp. 254-273).  London: Routledge.

Sonnet, E. (2001). What the woman reads: categorising contemporary popular erotica for women. In N. Moody (Ed.), Consuming for pleasure: selected essays in popular fiction (pp. 246-267).  Liverpool: John Moores Press.

Sonnet, E. (1998). From Emma to Clueless: taste, pleasure and the scene of history. In D. Cartmell & I. Whelehan (Eds.), Literary adaptations: from text to screen, screen to text (pp.  51-62). London: Routledge.

Sonnet, E. & Whelehan, I. (1997). Regendered reading: Tank Girl and postmodernist   intertextuality. In D. Cartmell, I.Q. Hunter, H. Kaye and I. Whelehan (Eds.), Trash aesthetics: popular culture and its audiences (pp. 31-47). London/Chicago, Ill: Pluto Press.

Sonnet, E. (1997). Desire and delusion: amateur and postmodern heterosexuality. In J. Dowson & S. Earnshaw, (Eds.), Just postmodernism (pp. 261-277). Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.

Sonnet, E. (1995b). Representing ‘others’: postmodernist epistemology - film and female spectatorship. In J. Dowson & S. Earnshaw (Eds.), Postmodern subjects/ postmodern texts (pp. 219-233). Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.

Sonnet, E. & Whelehan, I. (1995a). Freedom from or freedom to…? Contemporary identities in women’s magazines. In M. Maynard and J. Purvis (Eds.), (Hetero)sexual politics (pp. 81-94). London: Taylor & Francis.

Book Reviews^{[Back to top]}

Sonnet, E. (1999). Review of S. Hardy, The reader, the author, his woman and her lover: soft-core pornography and heterosexual men. Sexualities, 2(3), 360-362.

Sonnet, E. (1991b). Review of A. Benjamin (Ed.), The Lyotard Reader. British Journal of Aesthetics, 31(2), 171-173.

Sonnet, E. (1991a). Review of C. Lindey, Art in the Cold War: from Vladivostock to Kalamazoo. Over Here: Reviews in American Studies, 1(2), 110-119.