Dan Bashara received his MA and PhD from Northwestern University’s Screen Cultures program and his BA in English from the University of Florida. He teaches courses on animation, media and cultural theory, science fiction, the city in film, and the weird and fantastic.
His work explores animation in connection with other fields of visual culture, including architecture, graphic design, and cartography. His primary scholarly interest is modernism in all of its forms, particularly as it engages with questions of vision, perception, and abstraction, and he is currently developing a project exploring modernism and mysticism in literature and visual culture.
Selected Publications
- Cartoon Vision: UPA and Postwar Aesthetics (University of California Press, 2019)
- "Seeing Under Things: Animation and the Expansion of Vision at the Goldsholl Studio," Up Is Down: Mid-Century Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl Studio (The Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2018)
- "Cartoon Vision: UPA, Precisionism, and American Modernism," Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10.2 (July 2015)
- "See-Through Suburbs: Transparency and Privacy in the Postwar American Cartoon," 2ha 7: Suburbia + Cinema (July 2014)