Dr. Kim Marra's "The Pull of Horses in Urban American Performance, 1860-1920" received Honorable Mention for the 2021 ATHE-ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship.  Mark Anderson and Wade Hampton were project collaborators.

The Joint ATHE-ASTR (Association for Theatre in Higher Education – American Society for Theatre Research) Award for Excellence in Digital Theatre and Performance Scholarship is awarded each year to an individual or team that demonstrates innovation and rigor in the use of electronic/digital media for the purpose of producing or disseminating knowledge about theatre and performance. https://www.astr.org/page/awardwinnerarchive#ATHEASTRdigital 

The award was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research in San Diego, California, October 28-31, 2021. 

At the awards ceremony, selection committee member Erin Mee read the following citation for the Honorable Mention: 

“Dr. Kim Marra’s project -- which invites scholars, students, and the general public to explore how horses and other nonhuman animals have fundamentally informed humans’ senses of themselves over time -- exemplifies excellence in both its original research and its innovative use of digital technologies. A large-scale, immersive documentary film serves as the foundation of The Pull of Horses. It artfully synthesizes archival images, early cinema reality footage, and clips of present-day reiterations to animate the performative human-equine interactions that were instrumental to urban industrial growth during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The film gained further reach as part of a museum exhibit in University of Iowa’s Main Library Gallery from January to March 2020. When the gallery was shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Marra and her team pivoted and recreated the exhibit online, complete with recorded and web-based virtual tours. Dr. Marra notes that her use of digital, cinematic, and material media was “born out of necessity,” when she realized that written historiography could neither capture nor communicate the embodied practices and knowledge at the heart of her scholarship. Her project’s artful combination of film, historical artifacts, and virtual and physical museum spaces, as well as its emphasis on accessibility -- both in terms of public engagement and universal design -- make The Pull of Horses an inspiring exemplar of digital scholarship.” 

Winners 

"Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (2018-2021)"
Kate Elswit, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and Harmony Bench, Ohio State University, Project Directors
Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard and Tio-Monique Uzor, project collaborators