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 University. He holds the Carl A. Pescosolido Chair in Romance Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences but is also affiliated with the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He currently serves as Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature.
Originally trained as a literary medievalist, his publications are broadly concerned with knowledge design, cultural history, and media theory and history. They include The Electric Information Age Book(Princeton Architectural Press 2012); Modernitalia (Peter Lang 2012); The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard University Press 2014), co-authored with Matthew Battles; FuturPiaggio. Six Italian Lessons on Mobility and Modern Life, (Rizzoli International 2017), and, most recently, Storia rapida della velocità (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2025), winner of the 2025 edition of the Premio di saggistica “Città delle rose” and La storia d’amore di alluminio e caffeina, Nautilus 020 (LUISS University Press, January 2026).
Schnapp’s curatorial work includes collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford, the Wolfsonian-FIU in Miami, the Museo Madre e Fondazione Donnaregina in Naples, Tsinghua University Art Museum in Beijing, and the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. He led the development of the Trento Tunnels project —a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as an experimental history museum— from the time of its inauguration in 2008 through the years of its inclusion in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture and in the MAXXI (Rome) exhibition RE-CYCLE. Strategie per la casa la città e il pianeta (2011), among others.eJ
