Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles (born 1968) is a writer, artist, and since 2022 the editor of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum magazine, Arnoldia.^[1] Until 2022 he was the associate director of metaLAB at Harvard University.^[2] Battles is the author or co-author of six books, most of which are on the topics of writing or libraries.^[3] He was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2004.^[4] He has been called "a gifted stylist" by the Christian Science Monitor which commended his "beautiful writing about writing."^[5]

Matthew Battles

Battles also sees the institution of the library as more than just the building's contents. He headed a team which created a data visualization of the printing locations of books published in early-modern Europe, shown over time.^[6] He also worked with artist Sarah Newman on the video installation Your Story Has Touched My Heart which drew heavily on Harvard's photo archives.^[7][8] His "feral copyright project" at metaLAB looked into how copyright is lived and understood by regular people.^[9]

Personal life

Battles was raised in raised in Petersburg, Illinois. He received a B.A. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1992, and an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University in 1996.^[4] He is married and has one son and one daughter.

Bibliography

• Library: an Unquiet History (Norton, 2003)
• Widener: Biography of a Library (Widener Library, 2004)
• The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade, 2012)
• The Library Beyond the Book (with Jeffrey Schnapp, 2014)
• Palimpsest: A History of the Written Word (Norton, 2015)
• TREE (Bloomsbury, 2017)