Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing and creative projects have explored collections, landscapes, memory, and the sensory dimensions of media and technology. His work has appeared in such venues as The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The New York Times; his books include Library: An Unquiet History (Norton), The Library Beyond the Book (with Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard), and Tree (Bloomsbury). With metaLAB (at) Harvard from 2012-2022, he worked with a far-flung network of collaborators to create films, installations, and experiences from Boston to Berlin. In January 2022, he joined the staff of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, where he edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, a magazine exploring the urgency of tree-entangled science, history, and storytelling for our time.