Stefano Morello is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY, a Digital Fellow at City College, CUNY, and a Research Fellow in American Literature at the University of Eastern Piedmont (Italy). His academic interests include—within the realm of American Studies—pop culture, urban studies, poetics, and digital humanities. His dissertation, “Let’s Make a Scene! East Bay Punk and Subcultural Worlding,” explores the heterotopic space of the East Bay punk scene, its modes of resistance and (dis-)association, and the clashes between its politics and aesthetics. He is also currently working on a book on cultural, architectural, and public health policy responses to immigration, poverty, and disease on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. The book is based on “The Lung Block: A New York City Slum and Its Forgotten Italian Immigrant Community,” an exhibit he co-curated with architectural historian Kerri Culhane at the Municipal Archives of the City of New York in 2019.
He’s editor in chief and a founding editor of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), and has served as co-chair of the Graduate Forum of the Italian Association for American Studies (AISNA) from 2015 to 2021. As a digital humanist, Stefano focuses on archival practices, with a knack for archival pedagogy and public-facing scholarship. He created the East Bay Punk Digital Archive, an open access archive of East Bay punk-zines, and worked as a curator and consultant for Lawrence Livermore’s archive, now housed at Cornell University Library.
