Biography
Justus Nieland is Professor of English and Film Studies and Chairperson of the Department of English. He is a scholar of modernism and a film and media historian with a range of interdisciplinary interests, including modern design and architectural history, film noir, industrial film and corporate media, materialist and infrastructural approaches to the media, and the environmental humanities.
His latest book, Mulholland Drive, will be published in the British Film Institute’s BFI Film Classics Series in 2026.
His most recent book, Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the 2021 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.He is also the author of David Lynch (University of Illinois Press, 2012), Film Noir; Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization, with Jen Fay (Routledge, 2009), and Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (University of Illinois Press, 2008). He is co-editor of the Contemporary Film Directors book series at the University of Illinois Press.
Works
- Mulholland Drive. BFI Film Classics. Bloomsbury Academic. Forthcoming November, 2026.
- “Better than Before: Moholy-Nagy’s Rehabilitation Program and Modernist Media Therapy at Midcentury,” Modernism, Art, Therapy, eds. Suzanne Perling Hudson and Tanya Sheehan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024).
- “Organic Creativity: Alden B. Dow’s Small-Gauge Architecture,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 62:2 (Winter 2023): 157-61. In Focus: “100 Years of 16mm,” ed. Haidee Wasson.
- “Development Film, 194x: Alden B. Dow, Lake Jackson, and the Infrastructure of the Petrochemical Good Life,” nonsite.org, Issue 40: “New Perspectives on Mid-Century Architecture,” ed. Todd Cronan.
- “Midcentury Design Cultures.” Special issue of Post45, Issue 6, co-edited with J.D. Connor.
- Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
- “Container Culture: Film, Packaging, and the Design of Corporate Humanism at the Container Corporation of America,” in Post45, 2021, Issue 6: “Midcentury Design Cultures,” eds. J.D. Connor and Justus Nieland.
- “Toward Alphaville: Noir, Communication, and the Management of Affect,” in Noir Affect, eds. Christopher Breu and Elizabeth Hatmaker (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
- “Postindustrial Studio Lifestyle: The Eameses in the Environment of 901,” in In the Studio: Visual Creation and its Material Environments, ed. Brian R. Jacobson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020).
- “Colour Communications: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the Humanities Program of Design Workshops.” Special Issue: Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture,” eds. Elena Gipponi and Joshua Yumibe. Cinéma&Cie, 19:32 (Spring 2019): 69-84.
- “Conference Technique: The Goldsholls and the Aspen Idea,” in Up is Down: Midcentury Experiments in Advertising and Film at the Goldsholl Studio, eds. Amy Beste and Corrine Granof (Evanston: Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2018), 182-207.
- “Red Harvest: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Fate of Left Populisms,” in A History of American Crime Fiction, ed. Chris Raczkowski (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 179-191.
- “Infrastructures of Being: Modernism as Media Studies.” Review essay. Modernism/modernity, 23:1 (January 2016): 233-242.
- “Happy Making, Making-Happy: The Eameses and Communication by Design.” Modernism and Affect, ed. Julie Taylor. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015): 203-225.
- “Midcentury Futurisms: Expanded Cinema, Design, and the Modernist Sensorium,”Affirmations: Of the Modern 2:1 (December 2014): 46-84.
- “Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterflife of Modernism.” Modern Fiction Studies. Special Issue: New British Fiction. 58:3 (Fall 2012): 569-599.
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