see also Resumé
Here is one of those bios that get requested when you go to speak somewhere ...
Michael Shanks is an archaeologist and Professor at Stanford University. He is a CoDirector of The Revs Program at Stanford, was a CoDirector of Stanford Humanities Lab, is affiliated with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the d.school), and with CARS (the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford). His lab in Stanford Archaeology Center is called Metamedia.
Michael's research has covered the archaeology of early farmers in northern Europe ([link] and [link]), Greek cities in the Mediterranean [link], the design of beer cans [link], and the future of mobile media for Daimler Chrysler [link]; currently he is exploring the English borders with Scotland [link] in the excavations of the Roman town of Binchester [link], and investigating the Anglo-American antiquarian tradition [link] as a key to a fresh view of the early history of science. His teaching contributes to Stanford programs in Classics, Archaeology, Science, Technology and Society, Urban Studies, the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and the d.school.
His archaeology lab at Stanford, Metamedia, has pioneered the use of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate collaborative multidisciplinary networks in design research, media materialities and long-term historical trends. This comes after a long collaboration with the European performance company Brith Gof and with performance artists in the Presence Project - arts practice in multimedia. As a CoDirector of Stanford Humanities Lab, he championed experimental research and development in transdisciplinary Arts and Humanities, building bridges to a bigger picture on our contemporary cultural condition. A key theme in his current lab projects is the future of The Archive and The Museum [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), Theatre/Archaeology (2001), Archaeology in the Making (2012), and The Archaeological Imagination (2012) 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, design and making, is about our relationships with material goods and what is left of the past. This means we are all archaeologists now; cultural heritage lies at the core of who we think we are, and how we might respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow. Under this agenda Michael helps run the Revs Program at Stanford - a major new interdisciplinary project exploring the history of the automobile as a window on human-centered design and engineering.
Research and expertise
Design research and thinking - archaeology offering exceptional insight into how we understand creativity, innovation, change, and our dependency on goods
Early Greek cities in the Mediterranean, cultural production and ancient urbanism more generally
The northern provincial borders of the Roman empire, and after
Cultural heritage - the way the past conditions who we are, the way we act, the way we view the future
Long-term social and cultural modeling - a key to planning the future - rooted in archaeology because it is the only access to most of human history
New media - particularly the prospect of participatory and cocreative media - because the world as experienced is always mediated
Collaborative networks and agile project management - not least because an archaeologist can only work to understand long term change with the most diverse of colleagues and with the active participation of stakeholder interests in the remains of the past
links
Metamedia - in Stanford Archaeology Center
see also Resumé
