A revised, updated, Italian version of my cultural history of coffee consumption with a focus on interwar stovetop coffee makers like the Bialetti Moka Express just came out with the LUISS University Press in Rome. The book is accompanied by a new afterword which reflects critically on the economic viability of the “made in Italy” model. But the core of the book assumes the form of an account of how the autarchic cult of national…
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Last year, the Milan-based Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation, on whose advisory board I serve, launched its important Archives of the Present project which sets out to collect and preserve documentation from contemporary social and political actors who are mobilizing for a more just society and more sustainable development. As Massimiliano Tarantino writes in his introduction to the volume that documents this initiative (an eBook of which the noted archivist Maria Guercio and I are the editors):…
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On September 19, 1986, exactly one year after Italo Calvino’s untimely death, the following essay, prefaced by the renowned Italianist Vittore Branca, was published in the Corriere della sera. In it, the great writer reflects on the prospects for and effects of automatic writing. Right before he fell ill, Calvino had agreed to give the inaugural lecture for the 27th International Seminar on Advanced Culture at the Fondazione Cini on the topic of “Fantastic Universes.”…
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“Performance” is the second of three exhibitions developed to accompany the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympic games in one of the world’s most unique exhibition spaces: the Trento Tunnels (Le Gallerie di Piedicastello). It was preceded by “Records” (Jan. -Dec. 2024) and will be followed by “Competitions” (Jan.-Nov. 2026). All three are supported by the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino (FMST); the second was organized in collaboration with the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. Working with a…
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Two shifts in relationship between culture and technology inform my thinking about the contemporary state of imagination and trust at the ground level. Both involve the ever more intimate co-mingling of humans with machines. The first is the emergence of cobotics as a pivot point within conventional robotics, particularly as robots move out into the built environment and become entangled with our everyday lives. For millennia humans have imagined the robotic according to a substitution…
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The history of Olympic sport is written in records. Records tell the tale of individual athletes and national teams, of the rise and fall of ancient and modern sports, of changing approaches to athletic training and preparation. They also track the history of human achievements: firsts that are followed by new firsts in the pursuit of ever higher summits of excellence. Records are achieved by human bodies that compete both against their peers and against…
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The classroom is conventionally understood as a space of contemplative retreat where conversation and intellectual labor occur in a world apart: the world of learning. What if, rather than being cut off from public view, the world of the classroom, particularly those privileged classrooms that lie at the heart of elite universities, opened up on the main square? Not at every moment or during every lecture, discussion, and debate, but at special moments of saliency…
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I don’t do much self-chronicling but, between 1980 and 1983, I was involved in an intellectual adventure that I’d like to believe left some enduring traces in the field of cultural studies: the launch of a scrappy, serious, militant publication entitled Tabloid: A Review of Mass Culture and Everyday Life. Opposing both the acritical, celebratory tone of studies of mass cultural phenomena then emerging from within the field of American Studies (and, in particular, from…
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After more than a decade of operation from our physical base at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and institutional base within the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, metaLAB (at) Harvard has opened a new metaLAB in Berlin in partnership with the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universität Berlin. This exciting new venture, metaLAB (at) F.U. Berlin, was launched in early 2022 and reflects a circumstance that was present from the outset: that…
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On February 5th, 2021, I presented the lead lecture for this year’s in trasmissioni lecture series at AGO Modena Fabbriche Culturali, which was recorded. As the AGO site described the lecture: “L’intervento di Jeffrey Schnapp sarà dedicato al tema del codex, per ricostruire le tappe dell’evoluzione del libro dalla pagina allo schermo (e viceversa), segnalando i cambiamenti tecnologici, le pratiche estetiche e i mutamenti nella comunicazione della ricerca connessi all’avvento del “libro elettrico”. Una storia…
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Two years back, I was approached by the Germanist Wolfgang Straub and the photographer Peter Köllerer who were working on a book on the 33 Fascist-era ossuaries and sacraria that were erected by Mussolini’s regime along the front between Austria and Italy to house the remains of Italian World War I soldiers. Elegantly produced, the book came out in late 2020 with the Viennese publishing house Sonderzahl and contains over one-hundred splendid color photographs of…
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A couple of years have passed since the last book in the metaLABprojects series came out with Harvard University Press: Tara MacPherson’s award winning Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (2018). Since that time, the series migrated to MIT Press and I am pleased to announce the publication of the first volume in the relaunched series: Idea Colliders – The Future of Science Museums by the founding director of BIOTOPIA Naturkundemuseum Bayern and…
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I get interviewed quite a bit as well as doing my fair share of interviewing. Beyond the realm of immediate practice, I have long harbored an interest in dialogue (dialectic) as a mode of philosophical inquiry and puzzled over its relative rarity within the contemporary academy. Perhaps it appears too “unprofessional,” too tainted by the literary and the ludic, the matter of fact and the improvisational, to be taken seriously as a form of scholarship.…
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L’archivio animato – Lavori in corso // Work in Progress. An Animated Archive opened at the Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli in Bologna, Italy on November 23, 2019 and will run until May 17, 2020. I developed the concept for this somewhat anomalous exhibition and served as a consultant during the curatorial process; my long-time collaborator, Daniele Ledda (the founder of xycomm, Milan), did the design work. Rather than following conventional museological models, the exhibition…
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The Thing Tank is an exhibition of design fictions currently on display on the ground floor of Gund Hall at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. It was developed within the setting of a spring 2019 seminar/studio that I taught structured around a sequence of case studies of exemplary 20th century Italian artifacts devised to suit fundamental needs of modern life: sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling, cooking, writing, calculating, and entertainment. Though…
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