Shannon Mattern

Shannon Mattern is METRO’s Director of Creative Research and the 2025 Kluge Chair of Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. She has held tenured full professorships in media studies, anthropology, and the history of art at The New School in New York and the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

She has written four books about libraries, maps, and urban intelligence; edited several collections on digital technologies and everyday knowledge practices; and published over 100 articles (nearly all in open-access venues) and book chapters about a range of topics — from experimental libraries, geo-archives, deep-time document preservation, lichen typography, and “tree thinking” to local data stewardship, public design processes, pneumatic tubes, field guides, repair manuals, slide decks, and dashboards.

At The New School, where she served from 2004 to 2022, Shannon collaborated regularly with the Parsons School of Design, directed the graduate program in media studies and the undergraduate program in anthropology, and founded and directed the graduate minor in anthropology and design. 

She has designed and taught over 40 courses on topics ranging from urban technology, maps, and information infrastructures to design ethnography, local media, and critical university studies – and, since 2002, has created an open access website for nearly all of those courses. A celebrated teacher, she won The New School’s Distinguished University Teaching Award, was nominated for the University of Pennsylvania’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in her second year, and has advised over 70 graduate theses and dissertations.

Her website is https://wordsinspace.net/.