The prize, from the Dance Studies Association, is awarded to the best book in dance published during the previous three calendar years.

“I was lucky to receive a Kellett Mid-Career Award about five or six years ago that allowed me to focus on this book project for two years,” says Rosenberg, a professor who chairs the School of Education’s Art Department. “My goal was to put together a sort of global curated vision of approaches to the field of screendance; one that took into account all the possibilities of how both scholars and practicing artists consider the terrain of screendance through a contemporary lens.”

The selection committee recognizing Rosenberg for his work writes: “ ‘The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies,’ which is skillfully edited by Douglas Rosenberg, features a gracefully comprehensive introduction and 36 impactful chapters from leading scholars who expand our understanding of screen technologies as creative, collaborative tools for dance.”

The committee continues: “Both foundational and insightful, the essays focus on pioneering figures like Loie Fuller, Maya Deren, and Norman McLaren; on histories from Harlem and Hollywood to Brazil and Bollywood; and on themes that productively intertwine virtual bodies, framing, editing, space, race, gender, and politics. Authors from dance studies and related fields turn their gazes toward the way screendance can provide a liberating or controlled space, an ever-changing canvas, a democratic frontier, a site for social justice, new aesthetic pleasure, or a viral phenomenon with many meanings.”

They add that the book is “readable, rigorous, and thought-provoking, ‘The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies’ engages popular, contemporary, traditional, and historical dance, offering wide-ranging new ways of understanding how ideas travel and can transform our lives through the ‘stage’ of the screen.”

“This award not only honors all the contributors to this volume but signals an institutional validation of the field as well,” says Rosenberg, who will receive this award in August at the 2019 Dance Studies Association Conference at Northwestern University.