With support from University Seminars
Join us for a book talk by Professor and Chairperson of English at Michigan State University, Justus Nieland on his new work Modern Housing Media.
This presentation explores modern housing as a compelling problem for media studies by returning to the multimedia practice of housing activist and educator Catherine Bauer. During the 1930s, Bauer established herself at the forefront of radical, New Deal housing reform in the U.S. with the publication of her landmark study Modern Housing(1934), a manifesto for affordable, contemporary housing as a public right. I situateModern Housing within a multi-media genealogy of interwar modernist experiments in the communication of ideas about modern housing. And I discuss Modern Housing within the promiscuous range of Bauer’s media practice as a housing activist, educator, and public servant across the 1930s and into wartime mobilization. I narrate the coevolution of New Deal housing reform, experiments in welfare media pedagogy, and period-specific debates about propaganda and public relations, which Bauer engaged enthusiastically. Working closely with a series of films about social housing made in and around Bauer’s network between 1938-1941, I track the emergence of race as a conceptual axis in Bauer’s multimedia practice and housing research. In Bauer’s case, these interwar experiments set the political terms for her post-war red-baiting, as well as her midcentury embrace of social-scientific media methods—especially those aimed at combatting racially exclusive housing practices and policies.
Professor Nieland's talk will be followed by a response from Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.
Please RSVP to comparativemedia@columbia.edu to receive the pre-circulated readings (and to receive access to campus, for non-Columbia affiliates).
Justus Nieland is Professor and Chairperson of English at Michigan State University, and teaches in the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era which was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. His latest book Muholland Drive is forthcoming in November in the British Film Institute’s Film Classics series. His current book project, Modern Housing Media offers a media history of modern housing discourses, and a rethinking of housing as a good-life infrastructure at midcentury. The project is focused through a series of case studies inspired by the media practice and transnational housing network of the American activist and educator Catherine Bauer.
This event is supported by the University Seminars at Columbia University and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.