Shannon Mattern
Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Cinema and Media Studies

Shannon Mattern is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Cinema and Media Studies. Previously she served on the faculty in both the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Mattern’s writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of four books, including A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, which won the Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Ecology of Culture and the Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award. Mattern’s research has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships, most recently the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress, which she will hold in 2025.