Directors

Henry Lowood

Henry Lowood is Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections, as well as Film & Media Studies, in the Stanford University Libraries. He is also a lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society Program and the Introduction to the Humanities program at Stanford. Since 2000, he has been director of the How They Got Game Project in the Stanford Humanities Laboratory (SHL), a research project focused on the history of computer games and simulations; since 2004, he has been co-director of the SHL, as well. Among the many initiatives undertaken by the How They Got Game Project, he is curator of The Machinima Archive, a collection of game-based movies hosted and preserved by the Internet Archive, and is hard at work on the preserving virtual worlds project, funded by the U.S. Library of Congress, to develop practices for preservation of digital games and virtual worlds.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp (Founder)

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."

Michael Shanks

Michael Shanks is the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Professor of Classical Archaeology at Stanford University [link]. He has worked on the archaeology of early farmers in northern Europe ([link] and [link]), Greek cities in the Mediterranean [link], has researched the design of beer cans [link] and the future of mobile media [link]; currently he is exploring the Roman borders with Scotland [link] and investigating the Anglo-American antiquarian tradition [link]. His lab at Stanford, Metamedia, is pioneering the use of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate collaborative multidisciplinary research networks in archaeology, design history and media materialities. This comes after a long collaboration with the European performance company Brith Gof and with performance artists in the Presence Project. As a Director of Stanford Humanities Lab he is championing experimental research and development in transdisciplinary arts and humanities. A key theme in his current lab projects is the future of The Archive [link]. A series of critical interventions in debates about the character of the archaeological past, including the books ReConstructing Archaeology (1987), Social Theory and Archaeology (1987), Experiencing the Past (1992), Art and the Early Greek State (1999) and Theatre/Archaeology (2001) have made him a key figure in contemporary archaeological thought. For Michael, archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology, the discipline of things, is about our relationships with what is left of the past. This means we are all archaeologists now.

John Willinsky 

John Willinsky taught for a decade in the schools of northern Ontario before moving to the post-secondary sector where is currently a Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Education (U.S). His books include the Empire of Words: the Reign of the OED (Princeton, 1994) and Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minnesota, 1998), and Technologies of Knowing (Beacon 2000), while his most recent book, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006) has won two outstanding book awards. Willinsky also directs the Public Knowledge Project, which has developed open source software for the online management and publishing of principally open access journals (deployed by over 1,700 journals in 15 languages), and he is currently conducting research on the public and educational impact of open access publishing, while collaborating on journal-development initiatives in Africa, South America, and South East Asia. His publications over the last 10 years, as well as the software he has been part of developing, are freely available at the Public Knowledge Project website http://pkp.sfu.ca.

Staff

Henrik Bennetsen

In his role as associate director of the Stanford Humanities Lab Henrik maintains a strong interest in 3D collaborative spaces and open source technology. He is heading out the Speed Limits research project, a collaboration with the Danish Bornholm's Kunstmuseum to how 3D collaborative technologies may augment traditional cultural institutions. As part of this he is deeply involved in the development of the open source Sirkata platform for the deployment of games and virtual worlds. At the 2009 MiTo music festival he performed in the Mixed Reality Performance: Una serata in Sirikata after leading the development of the enabling technologies. Previously Henrik lead the Lifesquared research project that explored animating traditional archives using new technology. The work was shown at The Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal (2007) as well as SFMOMA (2008). In 2007 he co-founded the Stanford Open Source Lab that has since grown to about 60 members from across the Stanford community. Henrik is Danish and has a MSc. In Media Technology and games from the IT University of Copenhagen and a BSc. in Medialogy from Aalborg University. Before his return to the world of academia Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self expression augmented by technology.

Matteo Bittanti

Matteo Bittanti's research focuses on the cultural, social, and theoretical aspects of emerging technologies, with an emphasis on the interrelations of popular culture, visual culture, and the arts. Primary interest is the social and cultural impact of videogames. Bittanti has investigating the intersections between cinema and videogames, forms of consumerism, and popular narratives. He currently teaches Game Studies at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He earned his Ph.D in New Media Studies at IULM University in Milan, a Master of Science in Communications at San Jose' State University and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Media Studies at the University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. He has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of California Berkeley between 2006 and 2008. He is the director of Ludologica, the first Italian academic book series on videogames and the director of videoludica.game culture, a website devoted to critical studies of electronic entertainment. He has written and edited books relating to game studies and film studies. His personal website can be found here.

Core collaborators

Dena DeBry

Dena previously worked at Stanford's Visual Resources Center in Stanford's Art and Architecture Library, and in Freshman and Sophomore Programs . Prior to her arrival at Stanford in 2000, Dena was the Director of Technology and Program Development at Pratt Manhattan and an assistant professor in the Fine Arts department at Pratt Institute. Dena is a frequent volunteer for ACM SIGGRAPH and chaired the conference in 2004. At SHL, she played a key role in the Metaverse U conference and maintains the websites. Dena's main interests are in digital art, image collections, and digital libraries. She now runs a small company which provides services in these arenas called Buttonwillow Six.

Gordon Knox

Gordon Knox  identifies, develops and implements international projects that combine the understandings and techniques of the humanities and the sciences and engage them in on-the-ground efforts to effect social change. Previously Knox was at the Montalvo Arts center in Saratoga, California where he designed, developed and established the organization’s international participation in the world of arts and letters through the Lucas Artists Programs. Implementing his commitment to the open flow of ideas and underscoring his belief that the advancement of civil society requires articulate critical analysis and inclusive social action, Knox helped establish Montalvo as an institution recognized for its ambitious projects often involving unusual collaborations. During the 1990’s as the founding Director of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, Knox envisioned and established a center for the arts designed to advance and widen the discourse of contemporary cultural practice by engaging the voices and thinking of practitioners from all parts of the world and providing them with excellent conditions to advance their work. Civitella quickly became a new model for international, multidisciplinary residency programs. Knox has advised numerous international residency programs and cultural institutions in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa in the areas of fund raising, management, program design and international collaboration. He has served as an advisor and on the boards of the Paris Review, Res Artis, Roulette, the Ratti Foundation, the Sanskriti Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts among others. Knox’s interest in the role of the arts in society and the process of critical, artistic inquiry stems from his extensive training as a social anthropologist exploring the relationship between ideas and social action.