Christine Poggi is Professor of modern and contemporary art and criticism in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Italian Section, Romance Languages. She is author of the award-winning book Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton University Press, 2009), which received the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. She is also co-editor, with Lawrence Rainey and Laura Wittman, of Futurism: An Anthology (Yale, 2009), a new collection of Futurist manifestos, creative texts, and images. Her research has focused on early twentieth-century European avant-gardes, the invention of collage and constructed sculpture, the rise of abstraction, and the relationship of art to emerging forms of labor and technology.  She also works on the art of the sixties and seventies and on contemporary art.