The personal website of Jeffrey Schnapp: professor at Harvard University; director of metaLAB; co-founder & Chief Visionary Officer of Piaggio Fast Forward.

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 (his principal appointment) 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.” An expanded English edition of Storia rapida della velocità, entitled Quickening. An Anthropology of Speed is forthcoming with Zone Books in 2026. Also forthcoming in 2026 is La storia d’amore di alluminio e caffeina, Nautilus 020 (Rome: LUISS University Press, January 2026). Two of his English editions/translations of works by Bruno Munari, Fantasy – Invention, Creativity, and Imagination in Visual Communication (2024) and Design and Visual Communication (2025), have recently appeared with Inventory Books in Los Angeles. A third and final volume in the Bruno Munari trilogy is in preparation: the first English translation/edition of Da cosa nasce cosa (One Thing Leads to Another).

Schnapp’s curatorial work includes collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts (Stanford), the Wolfsonian-FIU (Miami), the Museo Madre e Fondazione Donnaregina (Naples), Tsinghua University Art Museum (Beijing), and the Canadian Center for Architecture (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). The Trento Tunnels have operated continuously since that time and are currently hosting the second of three exhibitions, entitled “Performance,” dedicated to the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, with Schnapp serving as overall curatorial coordinator and, with his metaLAB colleagues Kim Albrecht, Giacomo Nanni, and Dario Rodighiero, responsible for a key piece of the exhibition itinerary: an immersive data storytelling environment in which visitors experience and interact with the entire database of Winter Olympic history (1924-2024). Other curatorial projects have included Universo futurista / Futurist Universe, which marked the inauguration of the Fondazione Cirulli in Bologna (2018-2019), as well as development of two innovative “living” archive projects: Fondazione Cirulli’s own L’archivio animato – Lavori in corso, inaugurated on October 23, 2019 as a “perpetual exhibition machine,” and the Centro Studi e Archivio della Comunicazione‘s (CSAC) Archivio dal vivo which, since October 2020 has enabled visitors to experience alternating portions of the CSAC’s abundant and rich archives at the Valserena Abbey in Parma.

After three years of service as co-founder and CEO at Piaggio Fast Forward, Schnapp assumed the position of Chief Visionary Officer effective June 2018. Piaggio Fast Forward is a subsidiary of the Milan-based Piaggio Group, known throughout the world for iconic vehicles like the Vespa and iconic brands like Aprilia and Moto Guzzi. Piaggio Fast Forward’s first generation of robotic cargo transporters has received worldwide coverage on television, radio, and the www. Its mobile-carrier gita™ has also won numerous design and engineering awards, including the 2020 Red Dot award for “Best of the Best” in innovative new products. gita was launched on the US market in late 2019; variations (gita mini and gita Plus) were launched over subsequent years; a heavy duty utility robot entitled kilo™ was launched in 2025.

Jeffrey Schnapp has spoken on some of the world’s most prestigious stages: the TED main stage, DLD, the United Nations, World Frontiers Forum, the Royal Academy of Sweden, the Global Leaders Forum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Volkswagenstiftung, SXSW, Festivalfilosofia, Lezioni di storia (Laterza), Festival Economia (Trento), TaoBuk, Fondazione Corriere della Sera, MEET Digital Culture Center (Milan), and the US National Archives.

For bookings and engagements in Italy, he is represented by the agency Elastica and can be contacted via the Elastica site at https://elastica.eu/it/relatore/jeffrey-schnapp/. For bookings and engagements outside of Italy, contact him directly via metaLAB (at) Harvard.