WATERLOO – Wilfrid Laurier University Press is pleased to announce that R. Bruce Elder is the winner of the Robert Motherwell Book Award for his book Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century.

The award, which carries a prize of $20,000, honors an outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts for the year 2008 and is granted by the Dedalus Foundation. The award committee praised Elder’s book, calling it a “remarkably ambitious, wide-ranging, and thoroughly researched study that opens new perspectives on the development of modernism and on the central role of cinema in that development.”

Founded in 1974, Wilfrid Laurier University Press has established a reputation for excellence in scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences, with over 250 titles in print and 28–30 new titles each year. Harmony and Dissent is part of the Film and Media Studies series.

“We are very proud of Bruce winning this prestigious award,” said Dr. Brian Henderson, director of the Laurier Press. “He has been a long-time author with the Press and it's great to see his unique and visionary scholarship being recognized in this way. Since the award has previously been won by authors published by such fine presses as Yale, Cornell, and Abrams, it puts us in pretty good company.”

Elder, a filmmaker and critic, is director of the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University in Toronto. He is the author of Image & Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture, A Body of Vision, and The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. In 2007 he received the Governor General’s Award in Media Arts.