Shannon Mattern

A postdoctoral fellowship at Penn, 2002–2004

After NYU, Mattern held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in Penn’s History of Art department. The move put a communications scholar in an art-history teaching environment. Her public course archive records a freshman seminar, “Textual Form,” in autumn 2002, and an upper-level seminar on space, place, and landscape in contemporary art in spring 2004. These were courses she built early in her working life, while the library research was becoming a book.^{21, 22, 23}

The “Textual Form” syllabus makes her first teaching priorities unusually tangible. It begins with the premise that a text’s arrangement, typography, margins, and paper affect its meaning. She moved from debates about speech and writing to scribal culture, printing, and digital information design. She assigned reading logs and an early paper for revision with her help. Johanna Drucker’s work on experimental writing sat beside graphic-design texts and historical accounts of news. She placed printed materials on library reserve when color mattered or a book’s price might prevent students from buying it. The syllabus joined a demanding reading practice to attention to the actual objects and costs through which reading happened.²⁴

The 2004 landscape seminar similarly joined theory to encounters with art. Its schedule included site-specific work, public and private space, memory, tourism, surveillance, and exhibition design. Mattern offered a choice of final formats: an academic paper, a creative project with accompanying writing, or a proportionately scaled collaboration. Museum and gallery visits appeared within the semester’s intellectual sequence.²⁵

Building work with Elizabeth Ellsworth

Elizabeth Ellsworth, a senior colleague working on education and media, was an important collaborator during these early years. Together they co-directed Media Space | Public Space in 2005–2006. The initiative connected courses with panels, visiting practitioners, a sound program, and an exhibition. It gave Mattern a way to bring students’ research and media production into a public setting, while making relationships across The New School and organizations elsewhere in the city.³²

Their final report gives the resources and labor behind the initiative. It began with a $6,000 faculty-development award and accumulated help from several departments and administrators. A seminar used New York as an extended classroom; linked courses covered digital architecture, location-aware media, and exhibition design. The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council provided gallery space at 15 Nassau Street. Students in Mattern’s exhibition-design course developed the floor plan, catalogue, wall text, publicity, and installation for a show of fifteen student and faculty projects in May 2006. The project involved visitors such as Antenna Design and the Center for Urban Pedagogy, which uses design and media to explain urban issues. Students encountered that professional practice while organizing work of their own.³³

The $6,000 grant was supplemented by financial and organizational contributions from other departments and administrators. Ellsworth and Mattern assembled a program in which faculty, students, and an outside cultural organization carried different responsibilities.³⁴

The required “Media Research Methods” course supplied another part of her early job. Its archived description does not separate a research student from a media maker. Students learned to judge sources, generate information, choose methods appropriate to a question, and develop either a research proposal or a research-based production proposal. Topics ranged from historical research and discourse analysis to ethnography and quantitative methods, with funding treated as a practical subject. Research was something that could guide making as well as produce a scholarly paper.³⁵

A studio in which the map was part of the research

Mattern’s “Urban Media Archaeology” course, taught in successive autumn semesters from 2010 through 2013, gave students a related problem. Each student or pair investigated an urban communication system through historical and archival material. Their individual work then entered a collectively designed interactive map. Choosing the platform and showing relationships were parts of the research. The surviving course archive includes a student-designed syllabus for the latter part of the 2010 semester. Students therefore participated in shaping the course as well as its final object.⁴⁰

Here media archaeology meant recovering older layers of urban communication: routes, conduits, antenna sites, or publishing districts. Students connected particular systems to their supporting environments. The collective map made their accounts meet, exposing differences in evidence and scale.⁴¹

Other initiatives had a more explicitly organizational purpose. Sound@NewSchool, supported by the university’s Innovations in Education Fund in 2012–2013, connected sound-related teaching, events, and projects across departments. Artist John Roach was principal investigator; Mattern worked in a larger group that included Julie Napolin and Jane Pirone. Democratizing the Archives, supported by the same fund in 2012–2014, linked university projects to local archives and their professionals. Historians Julia Foulkes and Claire Potter led that initiative, with New York Public Library’s Thomas Lannon among the collaborators.^{42, 43}

Writing for people who could use the research

Mattern received tenure in 2012.⁴⁴ In May 2012, Places, a journal of public scholarship on architecture, landscape, and urbanism, published Mattern’s “Little Libraries in the Urban Margins.” She looked at experimental libraries, temporary book spaces, and collections outside familiar central and branch institutions, drawing on interviews with nearly a dozen librarians. The essay did not treat all of them as one movement. Nor did it present a small, charming book project as a substitute for a public library’s funded staff and services. It asked what these experiments could do within specific settings, including a period of budget pressure on conventional libraries.⁴⁵

Her next Places work widened the geography. “Paju Bookcity: The Next Chapter,” published in January 2013, followed a visit to the South Korean publishing development near Seoul. Mattern had imagined something close to a bibliophile’s paradise; the place she encountered was also a working district of publishers, printers, and distributors. Her photographs and account attended to buildings, production, circulation, and the difficulty of creating a public cultural destination within a planned industrial setting. A field visit corrected the expectations with which she had arrived.⁴⁶

Writing for Places became a substantial continuing part of her professional life. The venue placed her research before architects, planners, artists, and other readers who might never encounter a specialist media-studies article. Illustrated essays joined reporting to historical references and notes. She later described roughly thirty pieces as the background from which a book emerged: years of public writing had accumulated before another publication was proposed.⁴⁷

What she meant by attention to form

In her 2014 essay “Embracing the Formalist Mantle,” Mattern looked back at reading McLuhan while preparing her undergraduate thesis on human–computer interaction in Wired. She had worried that caring about media forms might imply indifference to content or social circumstances. She came instead to use formal attention to investigate relationships among technologies, people, places, institutions, and political economy. An interface, a pipe, a shelf, or a page could be studied as part of a system through which people acted. She also linked McLuhan’s attention to different senses with her decision to include artworks and creative practice in teaching.⁵¹

In 2014–2015 she was a faculty fellow at the Mellon-funded Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought, based at The New School for Social Research. The institute put her into a setting where design practice and the study of social life could meet. Her November 2014 presentation, “Intellectual Furnishings,” examined bookshelves, desks, server racks, and furniture for managing digital devices as objects that shape both knowledge work and feeling. Her father’s shelves had answered a reader’s particular needs; the new research asked how furnishings organize such needs across different institutions and periods.^{52, 53}

Another collective, Re/Lab, ran from 2014 to 2016 under Melissa Friedling’s leadership. Mattern joined colleagues including Kate Eichhorn, Amir Husak, and Barry Salmon in an effort to recover the histories of older equipment in university laboratories, classrooms, and offices. Its project record proposed a collection of object biographies, linked teaching, and workshops. The object biography asks where a device came from, who used it, how it changed, and what replacing it obscures. Here the institution’s own equipment supplied material for research and teaching. The project’s stated plans should be distinguished from a verified complete surviving collection.⁵⁴

A grant becomes an exhibition

Mattern’s work with Orit Halpern and Brian McGrath on Emergent Infrastructures, a 2013–2015 university Cluster Grant project, connected media study, architecture, design, and the history of science. The team asked how infrastructures come into being and how judgments of their success or failure are made. Its members also included Irish, Pirone, and Solomon, colleagues with whom she had already worked.⁵⁵

The group chose an exhibition as one of its final forms. Furnishing the Cloud, held at The New School’s Aronson Gallery from 9 to 22 March 2015, brought in architect Kimberly Ackert and gallery director Radhika Subramaniam. Ackert’s furniture students used Mattern’s writing among their starting materials and made full-scale cardboard prototypes for reading, charging devices, and holding data-related equipment. Halpern’s students prepared research dossiers; students from Mattern’s archive course revised their own projects for the website. Laura Sanchez developed work on branch-library design, and Eishin Yoshida explored the books that pass through personal collections. Mattern helped curate the show and wrote its wall text; Daniel Udell developed the website and Nadia Christidi assisted the curators.⁵⁶

She also recorded an unrealized plan for the entrance wall, distinguishing it from what the team made. The collaboration gave her writing about furnishings a role within students’ design and exhibition work.⁵⁷

Public information and public privacy

In November 2016, Mattern’s “Public In/Formation” responded to New York’s LinkNYC kiosks, whose web-browsing function had been disabled after complaints about use. She asked why a major public internet initiative had failed to draw on librarians’ experience with shared access and competing users. Her research included conversations with data-infrastructure scholars Tracey Lauriault and Rob Kitchin about preservation, provenance, and municipal records. It brought library and archive expertise into a debate dominated by technology suppliers and city government. The argument concerned what these professionals knew how to do, and the consequences of excluding them from planning.⁶³

The 2018–2019 exhibition Privacy in Public moved related questions into nine New York branch libraries. Mattern co-curated it with Greta Byrum of The New School’s Digital Equity Laboratory. METRO, all three city library systems, and the Mayor’s Office for the Chief Technology Officer were partners; Davis Erin Anderson and Hill managed the project. Artists including Mimi Onuoha, Salome Asega, Tega Brain, and Taeyoon Choi created works for particular branches. Ingrid Burrington designed a guidebook that visitors could use to record their journeys. The exhibition treated privacy as something shared by communities, rather than a burden managed solely through an individual’s passwords and settings. Librarians and branch staff were participants in bringing that discussion to their local publics.⁶⁴

Helsinki and a different library commission

With media scholar Jussi Parikka, Mattern also became a MOBIUS fellow of the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York. Their collaboration, developed from 2017 to 2019, commissioned work by Samir Bhowmik, Tuomas A. Laitinen, and Jenna Sutela for Helsinki’s new central library, Oodi. The Library’s Other Intelligences opened in January 2019 and ran until March. The Kone Foundation supported the fellowship’s international professional exchanges.^{65, 66}

Bhowmik’s Memory Machines, made with 00100 ENSEMBLE, was a performative tour through ordinarily concealed parts of Oodi: climate-control and power systems, checkout infrastructure, data, storage, and distribution. Sutela contributed an invented-language artist’s book and video derived from her experiments with machine learning and interspecies communication. Laitinen’s Swarm Chorus combined generative composition, voices, and a sound installation. These commissions brought their research and the artists’ work into contact with visitors to a working library.⁶⁷

Back in New York, Mattern helped organize the March 2019 symposium “Code, Craft & Catalogues: Arts in the Libraries,” another collaboration between METRO and the Finnish Cultural Institute. The symposium extended the Helsinki project into conversation with New York’s library and arts communities. Neta Bomani and Cybernetics Library provided live documentation; a zine designed by Johanna Lundberg extended the event into print.⁶⁸

The city-as-computer argument in public

Mattern’s 2015 essay on the urban dashboard examined the interfaces through which decision-makers view a city. She followed precedents in mission control and managerial information systems into contemporary municipal displays. A dashboard condenses a great deal of activity into selected indicators. Her question was what becomes legible in that reduction, who selects the measures, and what remains outside them. She was examining an actual design instrument used in governance, with a history and institutional assumptions.⁷²

The February 2017 Places essay “A City Is Not a Computer” addressed technology companies’ ambitions to design or optimize urban life. She read proposals for new cities alongside the histories and forms of knowledge they tended to overlook. Calling a city intelligent could refer to much more than its data-processing capacity: residents, workers, public institutions, and the accumulated arrangements of urban life possessed knowledge that was difficult to express as a metric. The title supplied a memorable public statement of an argument developed through her earlier books and library work.⁷³

Her reporting remained attentive to particular projects. For “Post-It Note City,” published in February 2020, she visited Sidewalk Toronto’s workspace at Quayside. The room presented a technology-driven development through rough models, comment cards, plywood, and the apparent informality of a workshop. She observed the materials and talked with a Sidewalk Labs representative. The essay asked how invitations to participate actually entered decision-making, and whether the look of collaboration could stand in for public power over a project. Her account of the visit returned to problems she had studied in Seattle, while recognizing a different corporate and technological setting.⁷⁴

She also edited How to Run a City Like Amazon, and Other Fables with Mark Graham, Kitchin, and Joe Shaw in 2019. Meatspace Press offered the volume for sale in print and freely as a digital download. From September 2019 through January 2020, she guest-edited eleven installments of Urban Omnibus’s “Digital Frictions,” working with editors Mariana Mogilevich and Josh McWhirter. These were opportunities to convene other researchers’ accounts, using smaller publishers and architectural editorial institutions as well as university presses.^{75, 76}

A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences appeared with Princeton University Press in 2021. In a later interview with Elliott Montpellier, Mattern explained that the project grew from her substantial body of Places essays and an invitation from the journal and the press. She asked readers whether a book would be useful, given that so much was already available online. A bound volume could collect and rework the arguments for another audience, but it also entered an academic economy in which a monograph often counted more than public digital writing. She wanted an accessible book while recognizing that unequal valuation of formats.^{77, 78}

Maintenance, care, and her own family

In “Maintenance and Care,” published in Places in 2018, Mattern assembled research on the labor of sustaining technologies, buildings, cities, and lives. Her account moved among software maintenance, public infrastructure, domestic work, and art. It also questioned the romance of caring occupations. The essay drew attention to workers whose commitment could be used to justify low status, low pay, and expanding responsibilities. Librarians’ service, for example, should not make every additional social obligation seem costless. Mattern was bringing public knowledge work into conversation with other forms of upkeep, while asking how the work was organized and supported.⁸⁴

A later essay became much more personal. In 2021’s “Concealment and Compassion,” she described her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and the narrowing of a previously active life. Her mother had retired in 2004 after thirty-four years in special education, yet continued helping former students, organizing local services, and mentoring younger teachers. Mattern wrote about her mother’s habits of gathering and sorting things, and the family’s attempts to understand what the changing household meant. The essay then investigated how built settings could provide dignity and care for people with dementia. The opening family account explains why these questions had become urgent for her; it was also a public act of writing about someone she loved.⁸⁵

In January 2021, Mattern joined M. E. Luka and Annette Markham to teach an undergraduate “Digital Ethnography” intensive linking The New School with RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre in Melbourne and the University of Toronto. The first two weeks required about five hours a day of meetings and asynchronous work. The intensive was followed by independent fieldwork, with a documentary or field guide to a digital environment or community as the final assignment. The collaboration gave them an international group of teachers and peers while examining how digital technologies shape everyday relationships and institutions.⁸⁶

Her graduate elective “Mapping the Field,” also offered that spring, combined critical discussion with map-making. The design included a cartographer teaching assistant, map critiques, and research-based atlases using analog and digital methods. Mattern encouraged them to use the work within a thesis, dissertation, or other project: the class could support research already important to its participants.⁸⁷

When her partner left his New York legal career during the pandemic, they moved to Hudson. Mattern learned to manage a weekly six-hour commute.⁸⁸

Her spring 2022 workshop “Redesigning the Academy” placed the university itself under examination. Its syllabus brought together critical university studies, educational anthropology, radical teaching, alternative schools, and art concerned with institutions. Assignments asked students to examine admissions, evaluation, learning spaces, and publishing, then make speculative curricula, syllabi, manifestos, or other pedagogical materials. Field trips and design workshops were parts of the plan. A teacher who had spent years organizing academic programs was asking students to investigate how those programs and institutions might be made differently.⁸⁹

Julia Foulkes and archivist Wendy Scheir interviewed her in December 2022; the catalogue records institutional activism and the part-time-faculty strike.⁹⁰

Work, health, and deciding to leave

At the end of 2023, Mattern underwent emergency abdominal surgery at NYU Langone in New York. In her December 2024 essay “The Limits of Refusal,” she described the following hospital week as a rare period protected from academic demands. Her partner, Andy, traveled from Philadelphia to be with her. She reported having worked eighty- or ninety-hour weeks and feeling unable to keep accepting institutional demands. The interruption and recovery made changing her working life feel urgent.⁹⁹

She connected that experience to research on gendered faculty service and the professional costs of declining requests. Conversations with women colleagues provided support as she tried to understand the pressures that remained within a senior, secure position.¹⁰⁰

She also published a collection of teaching testimonials in December 2024. It reported more than forty self-designed courses, roughly seventy graduate theses and dissertations advised, and a large share of her work devoted to teaching, advising, and mentoring. The selected student messages emphasized clarity, thorough feedback, accessibility, demanding standards, and continued support. Mattern selected the messages herself. She also reported a nomination for Penn’s Lindback teaching award in her second year.¹⁰¹

In June 2025 she resigned. Her public statement named health and service pressures, difficulty finding collaboration, and conflicts over institutional values. She acknowledged supportive Penn colleagues, staff, and students, yet sought another home for teaching and creative public scholarship. Accepting lower pay, she relinquished the security of an endowed, tenured position for different working conditions.¹⁰²

The Misfit

The first course, “The Misfit,” met from September to December 2025 with seventeen participants from libraries, schools, universities, city agencies, and arts organizations. Mattern organized visits to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, the community arts space ABC No Rio, the artists’ book organization Printed Matter, and the Center for Book Arts. The subject concerned things that do not fit easily into shelves, boxes, classifications, or institutional norms. Readings brought different fields into conversation, while the eventual publication was intended to reflect the course’s unusual collection of parts.¹⁰⁶

Her published explanation of the syllabus also tells participants how to use it. Its annotations provide context, questions, and suggestions about where to focus. Some resources are invitations to browse; some are recordings that can be listened to while walking. Nobody tracks completion. She commits to giving advance notice of changes and to maintaining or reducing the workload.¹⁰⁷

Search and Discovery

The spring 2026 “Search and Discovery” course extended the city classroom from a bookshop and Poets House to Google, WFMU radio, Pratt Institute Library, Mount Sinai’s Levy Library, and Brower Park. Participants could compare several kinds of finding: following a catalogue, browsing, listening, bodily investigation, and exploration outdoors. The course announced a collective scavenger hunt, map, or field guide developed after the weekly sessions. Its public record distinguishes the taught semester from the subsequent production work.¹⁰⁸

It also records a revision based on the first cohort’s wishes. The initial design had tried to keep work outside class minimal because participants had full-time jobs and family responsibilities. The Misfit group asked for more opportunities to reflect, so Mattern added optional discussion and informal gatherings. Project ambition was to be calibrated to people’s time, interest, and energy. Learning how much a group could usefully do was part of the school’s development.¹⁰⁹

The CRC’s general structure includes digital course materials, optional gatherings, and a privacy-conscious Zulip discussion platform. After each weekly course ends, participants work with design and production expertise toward a shared public outcome, scaled for completion within six months. The school gives studying together and producing a publication separate schedules.¹¹⁰

Museums, a national library, and a third course

The move to METRO did not end Mattern’s work with other cultural institutions. In 2025 she was Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. The appointment is confirmed in METRO’s subsequent program materials, alongside her own biography. She also spent summer 2025 as Design Indexer in Residence at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. There she investigated indexes and catalogues through the museum library’s collections, from information design to architecture. A September public event with head librarian Jennifer Cohlman Bracchi invited participants to handle and discuss selected books, journals, and artifacts.^{111, 112}

For autumn 2026, METRO announced “Public Study,” taught by Mattern across New York from September through December. Its subject is the city’s history and present ecology of popular, alternative, and radical education, including the roles of libraries and archives. Participants are to develop a shared project after the weekly meetings: possible forms include a guide, atlas, catalogue, or curriculum. The announced fee is $125, with member discounts and solidarity rates. The later publication remains a plan in the available record.¹¹³

Mattern now lives between New York City and Columbia County upstate, and names art, music, and dogs among her interests. She continues to advise organizations concerned with libraries and cultural infrastructure while teaching and researching within a professional community she knows well.¹¹⁴