Sunny Stalter-Pace

About Me

Sunny Stalter-Pace received her PhD from Rutgers University and her BA from Loyola University Chicago. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of modernist performance, literature, and urban space. Her most recent book, Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann's Life in Vaudeville and Dance, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2020. This critical biography considers how a vaudeville performer and producer transmitted European culture to American mass audiences. She is writing a cultural history of the New York Hippodrome.

Research Interests

American studies; 20th to 21st-century American literature; criticism and theory; cultural studies; genre studies; drama; space and place; women's and gender studies; American modernism; visual culture; film

Publications

Book

• Imitation Artist: Gertrude Hoffmann’s Life in Vaudeville and DanceNorthwestern University Press, May 2020
• Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway, University of Massachusetts Press, December 2013.

Edited Volumes:

• Theatre Symposium 31: Theatre & The Popular Co-edited with Chase Bringardner. Forthcoming for University of Alabama Press.

Recent Articles:

• “Disappearing Mermaids: Staging White Women’s Mobility through Aquatic Performance at the New York Hippodrome.” Theatre Survey 64.1 (January 2023): 1-21.
• “Getting to Know Gertrude Hoffmann (and Her Girls).” The Passing Show: Newsletter of the Shubert Archive 35 (2020/2021): 2-21.
• “The Precarity of Fluffy Ruffles: Reading a Progressive Era Comic Strip in the Age of #MeToo,” Feminist Modernist Studies 2.3 (2019): 314-322.
•  “Imitation Modernism: Gertrude Hoffman’s 'Russian' Ballets,” Modernism/modernity Print+ cluster, “Modernism on the World Stage” Volume 4, Cycle 3 (October 15, 2019).
•  “Gertrude Hoffmann’s Lawful Piracy: ‘A Vision of Salome’ and the Russian Season as Transatlantic Production Impersonations.” Theatre Symposium 25 (2017): 37-48.
•  “Underground Theater: Theorizing Mobility through Modern Subway Dramas” Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies 5.3 (Winter 2015): 4-22.

Recent Book Chapters:

• “Subway: Underground Networks Through Modernist Poetry and Prose.” Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology. Eds. Alex Goody and Ian Whittington. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 63-77.
• “Urbanization.” American Literature in Transition, 1920-1930. Ed. Ichiro Takayoshi. Cambridge University Press: New York, 2018. 240-256.
•  “The English talent for adopting”:  Imitation, Translation, and Parody in Beatrice Hastings’s New Age Essays.” Beatrice Hastings: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master, Eds. Benjamin Johnson and Erika Jo Brown. Pleiades Press: Warrensburg MO, 2016. 204-218.