Jeffrey T. Schnapp occupies the Pierotti Chair in Italian Literature and is professor of French & Italian, and Comparative Literature. His research interests extend from antiquity to the present, encompassing the material history of literature, the history of design and architecture, and the cultural history of engineering. He is the author or editor of eighteen books and over one hundred and fifty essays, most anchored in the field of Italian cultural history.  His research has been supported by fellowships or grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation (1992), the National Humanities Center (1991), the Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1991), the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1996), the Getty Research Institute (2005), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1986-1988, 2006), and the Canadian Center for Architecture (2007). In addition to curating a major mixed reality exhibition entitled SPEED limits, a collaborative project with the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Bornholms Kunstmuseum in Denmark, he is currently at work on two long-term book projects: one, entitled Quickening (on the cultural history of speed); the other, entitled Songs of Matter (on the culture of modern materials such as steel, aluminum, tempered glass, and plastic). Schnapp founded SHL in 2000 as a platform devoted to testing out future scenarios for the arts and humanities in a post-print world. The ambition was to create a hybrid institution, a kind of Media Lab à la MIT 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. Current research interests lie in the domain of mixed reality approaches to scholarship and cultural programming and in a broad range of challenges placed under the general banner of "animating the archive."