Jeffrey Schnapp

Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and GSD Faculty Affiliate

Jeffrey Schnapp is the founder/faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. At Harvard, he serves as Professor of Romance Literatures and Comparative Literature, and is on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

His most recent books include The Electric Information Age Book([Princeton Architectural Press 2012]); an anthology of essays on 20th century Italian art, literature, design, and architecture entitled Modernitalia (Peter Lang 2012); The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard University Press 2014), a publication co-authored with Matthew Battles that explores future scenarios for libraries in the digital age;Digital Humanities (Egea 2015), an essay on cultural heritage management issues recently published in Italian in the Meet the Media Guru series; and Blueprint for Counter Education — Expanded Reprint, a reprint edition of Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s 1970 work of radical pedagogy. Forthcoming in late 2016 is an extended essay on mobility and the 130 year history of the Piaggio Group, entitled FuturPiaggio (Rizzoli). He is the editor of the metaLABprojects series with Harvard University Press. Among his current writing projects is a panoramic study of the artist-designer Bruno Munari, entitled Bruno Munari, A to Z (Phaidon).

His pioneering work in the domains of media, design, digital arts and humanities, and curatorial practice includes collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His collaborative Trento Tunnels project—a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum—was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture and at the MAXXI in Rome in RE-CYCLE. Strategie per la casa la città e il pianeta (fall-winter 2011). Panorama of the Cold War, carried out with Elisabetta Terragni (Studio Terragni Architetti) and Daniele Ledda (XY comm), was exhibited in the Albanian Pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture and in Erasmus Effect – Architetti italiani all’estero / Italian Architects Abroad at the MAXXI (Dec. 2013-April 2014). He also served as chief consulting curator for BZ ’18-’45, a documentation center built under Marcello Piacentini’s Monument to Victory in Bolzano/Bozen open to the public since July 2014. BZ ’18-’45 was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2016 Museum of the Year competition by the European Museum Forum.

Exhibitions