Humanities Now. What Matters and the Speed we are Moving at. An Interview with Jeffrey T. Schnapp

Abstract

Jeffrey Schnapp is the Rosina Pierotti Chair and Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford Universty. A graduate of Vassar College (B.A., 1975) and Stanford (Ph.D., 1983), he taught at Dartmouth College before returning to Stanford in 1985. His research interests extend from antiquity to the present, encompassing Dante and his age, Fascist culture, the material history of literature, 20-century architecture and design, and the cultural history of science and engineering. His books include: The Transfi guration of History at the Center of Dante’s Paradise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), and Building Fascism, Communism, Democracy. Gaetano Ciocca: Builder, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). He has edited (with Robert Hollander) Bernardino Daniello’s Commento sopra la Commedia di Dante (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1989), as well as (with Rachel Jacoff) The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) and A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). He edited the Oscar Mondadori edition of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Teatro (Milan: Mondadori, 2004). He is co-editor of the journal Modernism/modernity. His main current projects are Quickening — An Anthropology of Speed (a transcultural account of attitudes towards velocity) and Songs of Matter (on the culture of modern materials such as steel, aluminium, tempered glass, and plastic). An internationally acclaimed curator who has collaborated with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Arts Center, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Schnapp’s recent curatorial work has emphasized experimentation with ‘mixed reality’ approaches to physical exhibitions.