Jeffrey Schnapp

I occupy the Pierotti Chair in Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where I founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000 with the aim of creating a transdisciplinary platform devoted to testing out future scenarios for the arts and humanities in a post-print world.

SHL is a hybrid institution, a kind of Media/Tech Lab wedded to a Humanities & Arts research center, devoted to thinking outside of the box, to experimenting with public forms of scholarship and culture, to exploring the interstices between research and art practice, to developing models and tools for collaboration and teamwork, and to providing the opportunity for students at all levels to learn through making and doing.

My current research interests lie in the domain of mixed reality approaches to scholarship, curatorship, and cultural programming and in a broad range of challenges placed under the general banner of "animating the archive." During the course of the 2009-2010 academic year, with support from the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, and with museum partners on both sides of the Atlantic, my research group is launching a new open source virtual world entitled Sirikata.