Samuel Pizelo is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. He received his PhD in English with an emphasis in Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis. He also has an M.A. in English from UC Davis and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Washington in Seattle.
Samuel researches the global history of games as model systems - media technologies that facilitate knowledge production through play. His dissertation, ""Modeling Revolution: A History of Games as Model Systems,"" argues that techniques and technologies of gaming have influenced the development of symbolic computation from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's geometry of situation to Charles Babbage's and Ada Lovelace's Analytical Engine and to the artificial intelligence research of scholars like John von Neumann, Alan Turing, Konrad Zuse, Aleksandr Kronrod, and Mikhail Botvinnik. Research of his has appeared in Representations, ROMchip, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Game Studies journal. Samuel is also a programmer and media practitioner, and has developed research tools with dynamic visualizations of natural language processing models and experimental projects in analog and digital game design.
Before coming to NYU, Samuel designed and taught courses in game history, digital media and game development, science and technology studies, comparative literature, writing, and interdisciplinary research. He also held graduate research positions at the UC Davis DataLab and the department of Science and Technology Studies, and is a founding member of the multi-campus Degrowth Game Design Project (DeGDP). He was the recipient of a UC Davis 2023 Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award and the Englund Dissertation Year fellowship.