It is our pleasure to announce that Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film (University of Chicago Press, 2020), by Donna Kornhaber, is the recipient of the 2021 SAS McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Scholarly Book on Animation, published in 2019-2020.
Against the backdrop of animation’s prominent role in promoting warfare and propaganda, Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary maps out alternate strategies, through which animators have resisted military imperialism and grappled with the costs of political conflict. Kornhaber’s book covers an impressive range of historical, national, and production contexts to consider how animation responds to lived experiences of war through an ethics of witnessing and processing suffering and trauma. The book’s nuanced and well-illustrated examples build a helpful comparative framework for identifying different responses to military conflict and its aftermath at a time when warfare continues to shift forms and tactics.
The adjudication committee also commends Animation and Advertising (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; co-editors Malcolm Cook and Kirsten Moana Thompson) and Arabic Script in Motion: A Theory of Temporal Text-based Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019; M. Javad Khajavi).
Animation and Advertising sets a new bar with the astonishing breadth of its historical and industrial scope, as well as the scholarly depth of its numerous individual case studies. The book definitively establishes a close and reciprocal relationship between animation and advertising, which has been woefully neglected by decades of scholarship in both fields.
Arabic Script in Motion models the vitality of rigorous praxis-driven animation scholarship. The book embraces the philosophy and vocabulary of Islamic calligraphy as a dynamic framework for understanding and composing animated text across a variety of interfaces and materials. Through a series of propositions and experiments that explore the gestural and temporal aspects of calligraphic form, Arabic Script in Motion connects animation to interdisciplinary media art in exciting ways.
