Brando was not alone in his embrace of method acting, which was popularized at the time by Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, said Keri Walsh, Ph.D., associate professor of English. But his performance in the film had the effect of making it synonymous in the popular imagination with explosive, masculine, working-class characters. Women, it was thought, did not embrace it.

“In fact, the method is a way of constructing and preparing for a performance, and it’s a way of working where you bring your personal life to the role, and you aim for a very naturalistic physicality through exercises,” she said, noting that physicality need not be of the blustery sort perfected by Brando.

“Those things could lead to any kinds of performances, so there were always women at the Actor’s Studio who went to Hollywood and had varying degrees of success.”

Walsh had explored method acting previously, in her latest book Mickey Rourke, (British Film Institute 2014), and was working on a follow up that would explore gender and sexuality and method acting. That lead her to realize that female method actors deserved their own story.

Support from Hollywood

This earned the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which recently named Walsh a 2018 Academy Film Scholar. The award includes a $25,000 grant to conduct research for a monograph be published by Routledge that is tentatively titled Stella’s Claim: Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film.

It’s a big jump for Walsh, who is the founder of Fordham’s annual Irish Women Writers Symposium and editor of the modern editions of James Joyce’s Dubliners (Broadview Press, 2016) and The Letters of Sylvia Beach (Columbia University Press, 2010).

“There are fellowships that people know to apply for every year, like the National Endowment for the Humanities, but this one, I just found on my own. I thought I would throw in my hat, and actually was very stunned to receive the award,” she said.

Method acting, which is based on the teachings of the Russian theorist and director Konstantin Stanislavsky, places emphasis on bringing emotional truths and natural physical behavior to roles. Strasberg built on this, Walsh said, by guiding actors through exercises where they revisited a powerful memory from their own past.

“That helps you theoretically connect to some kind of powerful emotion. Then you have to find a way to bring that to the character,” she said.

“It’s this complex thing where you’re creating a relationship between your own emotional experience and the emotional experiences that you read about in the dramatic text that are those of your character.”

The Connection to Feminism

Because the process has some similarities to therapy, it occasionally gets a bad rap as mere navel-gazing. Walsh said these critiques miss the fact its popularity coincided with the rise of second-wave feminism and that actors such as Geraldine Page, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Kim Hunter, and Joanne Woodward found it to be extremely valuable to their work.

“When Ellen Burstyn talks about the experiences she had in her family as a woman, in her first marriage, an unexpected pregnancy, and all the experiences of her life that led her to become a feminist, those were experiences that she used in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” said Walsh.

“I argue that the personal basis of method acting was actually a way for women actors to say ‘I’m bringing my personal experiences of injustice and what I’ve noticed in society about being a woman to the role. Method acting invites me to do that and says, even if the script doesn’t currently contain that, you can bring it. You have a right as the actor to show what you know.”

One need only to look at Brando’s Streetcar co-star Kim Hunter, who won an Academy Award for her role as Stella Kowalski, said Walsh. As part of her research, Walsh examined notes that Hunter made to her copy of the film’s screenplay, and compared reviews of the 1947 Broadway production, which she also starred in, to the 1951 film to trace what she calls a “feminist evolution” of Hunter’s performance.

“Even though Elia Kazan, who directed both the Broadway and the film version, did not see her character as having much feminist potential or didn’t care much about her character, Hunter molded her character to be a very informed kind of treatment of domestic violence in the context of men coming home from the second World War,” Walsh said.

“We’ve really written that one performance off as just ‘Oh she’s just the abused wife, so the method must not be good for women.’ But if you actually look at how she approaches the role and changes it from Broadway to Hollywood, it actually is quite a feminist story of trying to take seriously what a woman is going through in that situation.”

A Career Focused on the Performing Arts

Although film is a relatively new area of research for Walsh, she has long explored performance art and theater. In 2016, she organized the New York gathering of Waking the Feminists, a movement that calls attention to the wealth of women’s voices that are excluded from Irish theater.

She said she’s fascinated by the self-transformation that actors undertake for their craft.

“I think of myself as a feminist cultural historian who is trying to listen to the voices of women who have been in the industry, whether it’s in Irish theater or in Hollywood. I try to do the archival work that reminds people that their stories really challenge the dominant paradigms,” she said.

Their stories are especially resonant in the #MeToo era, she said, because actresses who might have kept personal stories involving abuse sequestered to their acting classes have now taken their stories public instead.

“Was it fair to just say ‘We’re going to talk about this in acting class, and then you put it away and use it to fuel your performance?’ Female actors are saying ‘no,’” Walsh said.

“I think Hollywood is ready in some quarters to listen to this. The fact that my project got this award from the Motion Picture Academy; I think they are saying, ‘We want to hear the stories and tell the history now.’”

Our genes are coded with explicit instructions for not only what we need to develop, said Alma Rodenas-Ruano, PhD, but also when each developmental process ought to begin.

That question of “when” is at the heart of Rodenas-Ruano’s epigenetics research, which she began as a researcher in the neuroscience department at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and has brought with her to Fordham’s laboratories.

“I’m interested in the neurological events that occur during what we call critical periods of development,” said Rodenas-Ruano, an assistant professor of biology. “As the name suggests, these are critical events that must happen for normal function to occur.”

Genes are subsets of DNA that define the fundamental traits an organism inherits from its parents. They are like a code that gives each cell instructions about what to do—for instance, to develop legs instead of fins or to start growing facial hair.

Epigenetics refers to cellular mechanisms cued by external events that influence whether or not a certain gene becomes active.

“The genetic code is set, but which genes are expressed or not expressed depends on the environment.” Rodenas-Ruano said. “For example, the first time an animal opens its eyes and lets light in, this sets off an epigenetic process of developing vision. If you deprive the eye of light, however, the normal development of those synapses will not occur.”

In the lab, Rodenas-Ruano uses zebrafish to study what happens to normal development if these epigenetic factors are changed or disrupted. Even small stressors, such as temporarily separating a newborn animal from its mother (and the same may be true for newborn humans, Rodenas-Ruano hypothesized) can alter certain epigenetic processes and gene expression as a whole.

“Disrupting this system causes mechanistic changes. The animal may behave normally, but if there’s another stressful event later in its life, that can trigger additional dysregulation in the system,” she said.

The potential benefits of her research could provide new insights for the treatment and prevention of neurological illnesses such as epilepsy or schizophrenia, Rodenas-Ruano said.

“Most diseases are multifactorial, and so we want to understand the exact triggers that make a person vulnerable,” she said. “We first have to identify and understand the basic mechanisms that contribute to normal function. Then, we see what happens if we disrupt these mechanisms—both what happens at first and what happens later on in a mature brain.”

Rodenas-Ruano, who just completed her first year at Fordham, is a recipient of a summer Grass Fellowship, a grant designed to support independent research projects by early career scientists. She is currently at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts with a cohort of researchers from around the world. There, she is undertaking her project, “Epigenetic Regulation of the Cation-Chloride Symporter KCC2 During Neuronal Development.”

“This laboratory is a hub for neuroscientists. Many Nobel Prize winners have worked here. Hodgkin and Huxley discovered how neurons fire (action potentials) here,” she said. “They provide everything, from housing and equipment to a zebrafish facility.”

When she returns to Fordham in the fall, she will have her own zebrafish facility on campus. The space will allow her to involve her undergraduate students in ongoing research projects.

“These are challenging concepts, but my Fordham students have been well prepared and eager to learn,” she said. “I hope we can generate meaningful data and answer some questions about this topic.”

Slater, a clinical associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS), has long had an interest in fashion, although it usually was only in service to her personal wardrobe choices.

So, she never expected that just a year after launching her fashion blog, Accidental Icon, she would top 21,000 followers on her Instagram account, make the cover of Grey magazine, and amass fans worldwide.

“Somehow, accidentally, while living my ordinary life, people seem[ed]to think I was a fashion icon,” she wrote in her first post. “Every day a person approaches and asks, ‘Do you work in fashion?’ (no) . . . or asks what fashion magazine I work for (none).

“If I got this far ‘accidentally,’ how far could I really go if I start learning and thinking about fashion with people who really do it and know it?”

An Accidental Icon

Slater is an unlikely candidate for fashion iconicity. She is the former director of the Child Sexual Abuse Project at Lawyers for Children, and is a designated child abuse expert for the New York City Family Courts. In addition to co-publishing the go-to book on social work practice and law, Slater established the first child advocacy centers in the city and developed a handbook for family court judges. At Fordham, Slater helped develop of the Law School’s Interdisciplinary Center for Family and Child Advocacy, and she currently teaches child welfare at GSS.

Over her four-decade career, fashion was not so much a hobby as an integral part of her daily routine. She dressed up to give lectures and even took classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. As she approached her 60s, fashion became a means to confront the aging process.

“I began to use clothes and my appearance as a way to counteract some of the invisibility that comes with age,” she said. “As I started to take more risks, it in fact made me very visible. And people began to say, ‘You should start a blog.’”

With her daughter grown and her career settling into a steady pace, Slater decided to investigate the fashion blogosphere more deeply. Almost immediately she noticed the dearth of blogs written by or for older women.

“They weren’t really speaking to a woman like me—women who are not famous or celebrities, but are smart, creative, fashion-forward, engaged,” she said. “So I designed my blog almost in opposition to everything else out there.”

Slater launched Accidental Icon in September 2014. Barely a month later, a stroke of serendipity came during Fashion Week.

“I was decked out that day—I had on a Yohji Yamamoto suit, a top from Japan, and a Chanel bag,” she said. “I was walking by Lincoln Center, and all of a sudden, I was swamped by photographers taking my picture. And then tourists started taking pictures, because they saw the photographers doing it. And it was all because they liked what I was wearing.”

The encounter landed Slater’s photo in Downtown magazine and put Accidental Icon in the spotlight.

A Fashion-Forward Rebel

Accidental Icon largely consists of short essays that reflect on some aspect of Slater’s life and how her apparel gestures to her various identities, including as an academic, as a New Yorker, and as an older woman. The essays are paired with photographs taken by her partner Calvin in various spots throughout the city.

Later in the week, Slater posts an itemized list of what she was wearing in the photo from that week’s essay. Fridays feature a “Fashion Bibliography” of articles that she found unusual or inspiring that week.

The blog offers an outlet from the constraints of academic writing, Slater said. However, she doesn’t consider blogging to be inconsistent with her work as an academic or as a social worker.

“I think academia has always thought that fashion is a frivolous topic, but it’s not frivolous at all,” Slater said. “The more I research fashion, the more I realized it’s a powerful force. We talk a lot about how it’s oppressive, or how it promotes ideal body types, but we don’t talk about how it can be productive.”

To that end, Accidental Icon has helped shatter age biases in fashion. In a culture that extols youth and beauty, a fashion blog run by a 60-something college professor has been an act of rebellion. Surprisingly, the majority of her followers are young people who are drawn to the fearless authenticity that she promotes.

“There is a tide change among the younger generation. They’re getting sick of celebrities and want to think more about style and who they are,” Slater said.

“There aren’t age parameters in fashion. My motto has become, ‘Don’t tell me there are rules.’”