Justin Rawlins
PhD

Background

Dr. Justin Rawlins completed a dual PhD at Indiana University Bloomington in Film/Media Studies (Communication and Culture) and American Studies and is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa. Rawlins is also the Executive Producer of TUTV Media Lab at the University of Tulsa. His research explores film and television performance and identity, media production, stardom and celebrity, audiences and reception, screen representations of race and gender, and media as it relates to the U.S. and Canadian "Arctic."

His latest book, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance, came out with University of Texas Press (2024). Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of so-called “Method” acting—what he call “methodness” in the book— prevailed upon industry, news, critical, and audience discourse communities to endorse and culturally entrench the nearly exclusive access of white male actors to the ostensibly rarefied “Method” while obscuring the racialized and gendered exceptionalism at work. Imagining the Method puts forth a revisionist history of “Method” acting and actors that lays bare the ideological and identarian cornerstones of methodness and its still-dominant popular cultural assumptions about race, gender, and ethnicity that have garnered scant attention even as they continue to inform how we talk about performance. The book has already met with significant enthusiasm. James Naremore, author of the preeminent academic treatise on screen performance (Acting in the Cinema), has praised the book as "impressively original, carefully researched, and consistently persuasive." Isaac Butler, author of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction for The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act, has stated that "[i]f you care about the evolution of twentieth-century screen performance, you should read this book."