About Me
Stefano Morello is an author, scholar, and educator, currently serving as Director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, a research center of the City University of New York, where he also co-founded the CUNY AI Lab.
His scholarly work combines digital and traditional methods to investigate the infrastructure and the transnational reverberations of American popular and unpopular culture.
Stefano holds a PhD in English with a certificate in American Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has been honored with fellowships and awards from the New York Public Library, the Wellcome Hub, the Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute, and several research centers across the CUNY system.
He is a founding editor of JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), a member of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy editorial collective, and the editor of the Italian American Studies Open Syllabus.
Recent Work
- The Trials of Migration, the first complete English translation of Bernardino Ciambelli’s I drammi dell’emigrazione (1895), with Martino Marazzi (Agincourt Press, forthcoming).
- The Omnibus Ciambelli, a digital edition of the collected writings of Bernardino Ciambelli (1862–1931).
- Il Venditore di Sogni, a digital archive of the collected works of Franco Lalli (1898–1955).
- “The Roll behind the Rock: An Interview with Larry Livermore,” Punk & Post-Punk (2026).
Publications
Books and Translations
- (translator; co-editor with Martino Marazzi) Bernardino Ciambelli, The Trials of Migration. Translation and critical edition of I drammi dell’emigrazione (1895). Agincourt Press // Forthcoming.
- (with Marta Averna et al.) Transatlantic Transfers: Objects, Aesthetics, and Narratives of Italy in the United States, 1949–1972. Thymos Books, 2025. (English / Italian)
Journal Articles
- “The Roll behind the Rock: An Interview with Larry Livermore.” Punk & Post-Punk, vol. 15, no. 2 (2026), 269–276.
- (with Paul Fields and Ellen Bernhard) “I Heard They Suck at Interviews (But We Edited It For Clarity): A Conversation with Fat Mike of NOFX.” Punk & Post-Punk, vol. 14, no. 2 (2025), 257–267.
- “Networks of Influence: Divagando’s Italian (and) American Literary Infrastructure.” Modern Language Notes, vol. 140, no. 1 (2025), special issue “Modernist Lives, Transatlantic Italian Crossings, 1949–1972,” 113–137.
- (with Isabel Estrada) “Let My People Know: Place-Based and Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Action.” Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), vol. 26 (2025).
- (with Lorenzo Costaguta and Virginia Pignagnoli) “L’istituzionalizzazione dell’AISNA Graduate Forum e le sue pratiche prefigurative.” Rivista Studi Americani, no. 35 (2024), 321–329.
- (with Zach Muhlbauer, Travis Bartley, Nicole Cote, and Matthew K. Gold) “Archival Inversions: Rethinking Knowledge Infrastructures through the CUNY Distance Learning Archive.” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique, vol. 13, no. 3 (2023), 1–22.
- (editor) “American Studies and Digital Archives: A Forum on Collaborative Knowledge Preservation, Accessibility, and Pedagogy.” América Crítica, vol. 4, no. 2 (2020), 143–155.
- “Digital Humanities at CUNY: Building Communities of Practice in the Public University.” América Crítica, vol. 4, no. 2 (2020), 113–122.
- “No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings on The Jetsons.” De Genere, no. 6 (2020), 113–127.
- “On Jamming: ‘Study’ and the Unstudied.” JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), no. 1 (2019), 4–9.
- “Like Mother Like Daughter, Like Father Like Son: The Spell of Age in The O.C.” Comparative Studies in Modernism, no. 11 (2018), 121–136.
Book Chapters
- (with Cristina Iuli) “Integrating Digital Humanities into American Literature Courses in Italy: Challenges and Lessons Learned.” In Critical Digital Humanities Handbook, edited by Stefan Brandt, Frank Mehring, and Tatiani G. Rapatzikou (De Gruyter, 2026) // Forthcoming.
- (with Marco Petrelli and Andrea Carosso) “La musica popolare.” In Storia culturale degli Stati Uniti, edited by Giovanni Borgognone and Marco Mariano (Carocci, 2026), 113–134.
- “Leave It to Fat Mike: PunkVoter as Infrastructure of Dissent.” In NOFX: Forty Years of “Problematic” Punk Provocations, edited by Ellen Bernhard, David Pearson, and Stefano Morello (Bloomsbury, 2025), 85–101.
- “Sulla strada.” In Guida al romanzo americano, edited by Giorgio Mariani (Carocci, 2025), 295–300.
- “Scene transatlantiche: l’eco italiane nella Beat Generation.” In Trame transatlantiche: relazioni letterarie tra Italia e Stati Uniti, 1949–1972, edited by Cristina Iuli and Stefano Morello (Mimesis Edizioni, 2024), 149–174.
- (with Cristina Iuli) “Transatlantic Literary Networks, 1949–1972.” In Trame transatlantiche: relazioni letterarie tra Italia e Stati Uniti, 1949–1972, edited by Cristina Iuli and Stefano Morello (Mimesis Edizioni, 2024), 11–38.
- “Kinship at the Margins: Punk-Rock Modes of (Dis-)Association.” In Family in Crisis? Crossing Borders, Crossing Narratives, edited by Andrea Carosso and Eva-Sabine Zehelein (Transcript Verlag, 2020), 159–172.
Edited Volumes
- (with Patricia Belen et al.) Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP), vol. 27 (2025), special issue “Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy.”
- (with Ellen Bernhard and David Pearson) NOFX: Forty Years of “Problematic” Punk Provocations. Bloomsbury, 2025.
- (with Cristina Iuli and Aaron Jaffe) Modern Language Notes, vol. 140, no. 1 (2025), special issue “Modernist Lives, Transatlantic Italian Crossings, 1949–1972.”
- (with Cristina Iuli) Trame transatlantiche: relazioni letterarie tra Italia e Stati Uniti, 1949–1972. Mimesis Edizioni, 2024.
- (with Fiorenzo Iuliano) América Crítica, vol. 4, no. 2 (2020), special issue “An Epistemology of Doing: Digital Humanities and American Studies.”
Blog Posts and Other Digital Publications
- “Divagando,” “Festival dei due mondi,” “Lawrence Ferlinghetti,” “Gregory Corso,” “Andre Luotto,” and “Italian Quarterly” (Italian and English entries). Transatlantic Transfers Atlas.
- “Choosing the Right Platform for Your Digital Archive.” Tagging the Tower, March 22, 2021.
- “DARC Open Meeting Recap.” Tagging the Tower, November 18, 2020.
- “Teaching with Omeka.” Tagging the Tower, April 3, 2020.
- “A Legible Digital Archive: Displaying and Sorting Content on Your Omeka Site.” Tagging the Tower, November 7, 2019.
- “A Conceptual Guide to Digital Academic Identity.” Tagging the Tower, November 30, 2018.
Creative Writing
- “wearing a flannel shirt hanging out, carrying a briefcase by one finger.” Lost & Found Light Relief (Series II). Manifold at CUNY, 2021.
- “Queen Anne Serenade.” JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), no. 1 (2019), 284.
- “read loved you name it.” JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), no. 1 (2019), 285.
Screenwriting
- (with M. Ilaria Tonelli) Chasing the Ghost of the Lung Block. 2024.
Reviews
- “Robert Fitzgerald, Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan: The Lyrical Lashing of an American Presidency.” Notes, vol. 83, no. 2 (December 2026) // Forthcoming.
- “Francesco Landolfi, Politics, Police and Crime in New York During Prohibition: Gotham and the Age of Recklessness, 1920–1933.” H-Net Reviews (H-Migration), June 2026.
- “Martino Marazzi, Through the Periscope: Changing Culture, Italian America.” Italian American Review // Forthcoming.
- “Twenty Years of Art of Ethnicity: A Retrospective Homage to Thomas J. Ferraro’s Feeling Italian.” JAm It! (Journal of American Studies in Italy), no. 10 (2025), 170–172.
- “‘Blackbird’ at the New Ohio Theater: Reckoning with Trauma and Its Aftermath.” La Voce di New York, September 19, 2021.
- “The Birth of a Nation.” Il Mestiere di Storico, vol. IX, no. 1 (2017), 105.
- “Scott McCloud, The Sculptor.” L’Indice dei Libri del Mese, no. 12 (2015), 2.
- “Gregory Corso, Gasoline.” L’Indice dei Libri del Mese, no. 4 (2015), 25.
- “Nick Hornby, Funny Girl.” L’Indice dei Libri del Mese, no. 7/8 (2015), 46.
Digital Projects
Digital Publications and Editions
The Omnibus Ciambelli
A digital edition of the collected writings of Bernardino Ciambelli
(1862–1931)—journalist, novelist, playwright, and chronicler of Italian immigrant
life—gathering serialized fiction, newspaper columns, and popular theater long dispersed
across archives in the United States and Italy. Also a digital companion to The Trials of
Migration (I drammi dell’emigrazione, 1895), forthcoming from Agincourt
Press.
Singhiozzi e sogghigni
Digital edition of Riccardo Cordiferro’s poetry collection
Singhiozzi e sogghigni (Araldo Italiano, New York, 1910).
Let My People Know
Let My People Know: The Story of Wilfred Mendelson, ‘Mendy,’ August
17, 1915 - July 28, 1938 is a digital edition critically annotated by the students in the
Spring 2022 course “Activism and the College Experience,” co-taught with Isabel Estrada at
The City College of New York.
Ellis Island
Recovery and redesign of Robert Viscusi’s sonnet generator—a project
inspired by Raymond Queneau and the Oulipo tradition that uses an algorithm to generate over
a duodecillion unique sonnets, echoing immigrants’ fragmentary paths of self-reinvention in
a new world.
Italian American Studies Open Syllabus
A crowd-sourced digital collection of remixable resources to explore
and teach the Italian diaspora in the United States.
Digital Archives
Il Venditore di Sogni
A digital archive of the collected works of Franco Lalli
(1898–1955), a prolific voice of New York’s mid-century Italian-language press
and the hand behind Divagando’s column “Il Taccuino.” Poetry,
plays, and prose—much of it unpublished—transcribed from manuscript scans,
translated, and cataloged.
East Bay Punk Digital Archive
A digital repository to preserve and make accessible zines, artworks,
and other ephemera produced by participants in the punk-rock scene that loomed in and around
the San Francisco Bay Area (1980s—1990s). The EBP-DA also includes Visualizing East Bay Punk
(VEBP), a suite of web applications that renders data from the Bay Area punk scene into
accessible, analyzable format.
CUNY Distance Learning Archive
A crowdsourced archive of personal and institutional documentation
related to CUNY’s move to online learning in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. Co-curated
with Travis M. Bartley, Nicole Cote, Matthew K. Gold, and Zach Muhlbauer.
Data Visualizations
Reti di Carta
Interactive network visualization mapping the relationships between writers, translators, scholars, and cultural institutions in the transnational Italian-American literary world (1890–1980).
Five Decades of DH
An interactive archive and dashboard exploring 2,858+ presentations
across 29 conferences of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (1973–2025).
Exhibitions
The Lung Block
The Lung Block: A New York City Slum & Its Forgotten Italian
Immigrant Community is a physical and digital exhibition co-curated with Kerri Culhane that
contrasts the Progressive Era narrative of NYC’s infamous Lung Block as an epicenter of
disease with the lived experience of its local residents.
Objects, Aesthetics, and Narratives of Italy in the United States
1949–1972
A bi-lingual digital exhibition and OER that leverages design, visual
art, literature, film, and commercial goods to tell the story of the transatlantic transfers
and cultural exchanges between Italy and the United States in the three decades following
the end of WWII. Co-curated with Marta Averna, Gioele Cristofari, Matteo Sant’Andrea, and
Marta Zonca.
The Beats in/and Italy
A storymap that builds upon the final projects of the students in the
first-ever course at the nexus of US literary studies and DH ever offered in Italy,
co-taught with Cristina luli at the University of Eastern Piedmont.
Creative Projects
ephemera
A small experiment in e-poetry: 23 unpublished poems from the
early/mid-twenty-tens, written while commuting across New York, Seattle, and Torino, and
reworked for the web. Part late juvenilia, part creative archive, part interface
poetics—best rendered on desktop, volume on. Try to find the easter eggs.
Tools and Infrastructure
CUNY AI Lab
Open-source tools, infrastructure, and teaching materials from the CUNY AI Lab.
Index Generator
A utility for automatically generating book indexes directly from PDF files.
LangGames
An AI-powered platform for game-based language learning.
Bibliography to Zotero
An AI tool for converting plain-text bibliographic entries into Zotero-importable formats.
Zotero Autofill
A Zotero 7 plugin that fills in missing item metadata using LLMs alongside the Open Library and Google Books APIs.
Teaching
Selected Syllabi
Instructional Materials
- Foundations: Coding with Generative AI (with Zach Muhlbauer, Parisa Setayesh, and Stephen Zweibel).
- Vibe-Coding Prototypes (with Zach Muhlbauer, Parisa Setayesh, and Stephen Zweibel).
- Creative Coding with Generative AI (with Zach Muhlbauer).
- Vibe Coding How-To (with Zach Muhlbauer and Stephen Zweibel).
- The Punk Archiving Toolkit.
- Introduction to Omeka (tutorial developed for the Graduate Center Digital Research Institute).
- Introduction to the Command Line (tutorial co-developed for the Graduate Center Digital Research Institute).