Justus Nieland

Candidate statement

My scholarship and teaching in modernist studies have long been interdisciplinary. My first book, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Illinois, 2008), was a revisionist account of modernist affect in film and literary history, the visual arts, and performance studies. My most recent book, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (Minnesota, 2020) explores the film and media experiments of midcentury designers as part of a sweeping technical agenda of happiness during the Cold War. Bringing together modernist studies, film history, design and architectural history, and media studies, Happiness by Design turns to the designer as a privileged figure of interdisciplinary media practice, when tidy disciplinary boundaries were challenged by the postwar vogue for “communication.” My recent co-edited issue of Post45, “Midcentury Design Cultures,” extends some of the interdisciplinary impulses of Happiness by Design. My essay, “Container Culture,” describes the role of modernist design in the packaging empire and corporate humanism of the Container Corporation of America, offering a media history of the cardboard box. I am also co-editor of the Contemporary Film Directors book series at the University of Illinois Press, and wrote the David Lynch volume for that series.