B Movies and Bad History: The Great War

Donna Kornhaber is Associate Professor in the English Department at the Universtiy of Texas at Austin. 

She is the author of four monographs: Charlie Chaplin, Director (Northwestern University Press, 2014; recipient of a 2015 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award from the University of Texas at Austin Co-Operative Society), Wes Anderson: A Collector’s Cinema (Contemporary Film Directors Series, University of Illinois Press, 2017), Nightmares in the Dream Sanctuary: War and the Animated Film (University of Chicago Press, 2019), and Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Series, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020).  Her articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, Film History, and Camera Obscura, among other journals and edited collections. 

In 2016, Dr. Kornhaber was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and she is researching a new book project entitled When Women Wrote Hollywood with the Academy’s support. 

She is also the series editor of the 21st Century Film Essentials book series, currently in development with The University of Texas Press.

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker, and her research has been profiled in The Hollywood Reporter, Texas Monthly, and Austin Woman Magazine.  She has appeared as a contributor on the BBC and NPR and has served as a guest film programmer at the Austin Film Society and the Bullock Texas State History Museum.  

Dr. Kornhaber is the recipient of numerous teaching awards at the college, university, and UT-system levels, including the college-wide Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Fellowship and the Josefina Paredes Endowed Teaching Award from the College of Liberal Arts, the university-wide President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, and the state-wide University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor within the University of Texas system.

In 2019, Dr. Kornhaber was named a Fellow of the Eleanor Butt Crook Professorship in UT’s Plan II Honors Program and selected to design and teach the program’s inaugural “Crucible Course,” a specially-funded category of honors seminars focused on experiential learning.  

Dr. Kornhaber is an affiliated faculty member with the Department of American Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. and B.F.A. from Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.