Faculty

Shannon Mattern

Associate Professor

PhD, Culture and Communication, New York University

Shannon Mattern’s teaching and research address relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces -- architectural, urban, and conceptual -- they create and inhabit. She has written about libraries and archives, media companies' headquarters, place branding, public design projects, urban media art, media acoustics, media infrastructures, and material texts. Formerly a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, she has also taught at NYU, Parsons The New School for Design, and Rutgers University. Her work has also appeared in Public Culture; Space and Culture; The Senses & Society; Music, Sound and the Moving Image; the International Journal of Communication; Invisible Culture; Design and Culture; the Journal of Architectural Education; and several edited volumes. She also edited a special issue of Media Commons' The New Everyday on "notes, lists, and everyday inscriptions," and she is now the journal's editor.

Courses Taught

• Archives, Libraries & Databases
• Between Media & Architecture
• The City and Sound
• Media and Materiality
• Media Exhibition Design
• Media Studies: Ideas
• Media Space/Public Space
• Sound and Space
• Understanding Media Studies
• Urban Media Archaeology

Recent Publications

• “Paju Bookcity: The Next Chapter” Places (January 14, 2013)
• “DataCase” CLOG 3 (June 2012)
• “Archizines’ Rustling Pages” Arquine 60 (Summer 2012)
• “Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins” Places (May 22, 2012)
• “Click/Scan/Bold: The New Materiality of Architectural Discourse and Its Counter-Publics” Design & Culture 3:3 (November 2011)
• “Fluid Text, Total Design: The Woodberry Poetry Room as Idea, Collection, and Place” Space and Culture 14:1 (2011): 27-50
• “Geometries of Reading, Light of Learning: Louis I. Kahn’s Library at Phillips Exeter” Nexus Network Journal 12:3 (Fall 2010): 398-420
• “Puffs of Air: Communicating by Vacuum” In John Knechtel, Ed., AIR, Alphabet City #15 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010)
• “Edge Blending: Light, Crystalline Fluidity, and the Materiality of New Media at Gehry’s IAC Headquarters” In Kristina Riegert & Staffan Ericson, Eds., Media Houses: Architecture, Media and the Production of Centrality (New York: Peter Lang, 2010)
• “Silent, Invisible City: Mediating Urban Experience for the Other Senses” In Frank Eckardt et al., Eds., Mediacity: Situations, Practices, and Encounters (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2009)
• “Font of a Nation: Creating a National Graphic Identity for Qatar” Public Culture 20:3 (Fall 2008): 479-96 [Reprinted in Volume 19 (April 2009)]
• “Broadcasting Space: China Central Television’s New Headquarters” International Journal of Communication 2 (August 11, 2008)
• “Resonant Texts: Sounds of the Contemporary American Public Library” The Senses & Society 2:3 (Fall 2007): 277-302
• The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007)

Research Interests

Relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces -- architectural, urban, and conceptual -- they create and inhabit. Additional areas of interest include, generally, media and design history and theory; and, more specifically, media form and materiality; media reception (especially reading) and the spaces in which we store, access and consume media; textual theory; and media and spatial poetics.

Professional Affiliations

• Society for Cinema and Media Studies
• College Art Association
• Society of Architectural Historians

Awards and Honors