The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Shannon Mattern as Kluge Chair in Modern Culture. Mattern began her time at the Kluge Center in January.
Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of Creative Research and Practice at the Metropolitan New York Library Council. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and information infrastructures. She is the author of “The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities” (University of Minnesota Press, 2007); “Deep Mapping the Media City” (University of Minnesota Press, 2015); “Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media” (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); and “A City Is Not a Computer” (Princeton University Press, 2021); and the editor of several collections. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her at wordsinspace.net.
At the Library of Congress, she’ll be researching how both furniture and trees shape the way we think.
The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is also pleased to announce the appointment of Nelson Tebbe as Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance. Tebbe also began his time at the Kluge Center this January.
Tebbe is the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. Tebbe works on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and general constitutional law. His articles have appeared in leading legal periodicals including Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Harvard Law Review. He is the author of a book, “Religious Freedom in an Egalitarian Age” (Harvard University Press, 2017). As a media commentator, he has published opinion pieces in media outlets such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the Washington Post.
A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Tebbe also holds a Ph.D. with distinction in the anthropology and sociology of religion from the University of Chicago.