Samuel Pizelo

Samuel Pizelo served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Game Studies in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Davis in 2024, with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies. His dissertation, “Modeling Revolution: A Global History of Games as Model Systems,” chaired by Colin Milburn, investigates games as historical modeling technologies for complex systems in science, computation, and other domains. Pizelo also holds an M.A. in English Literature from UC Davis (2019) and a B.A. from the University of Washington (2014).

Pizelo's scholarship centers on the interplay between games, media, computation, and knowledge production. His research demonstrates how 19th-century mathematicians Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace utilized games like tic-tac-toe, peg solitaire, and chess to pioneer algorithms for algebraic computation, probability, sequencing, and if-then logic, shaping the design of Babbage's Analytical Engine and early computing. Notable publications include “Games and the Rise of Systems Thinking: From Models to Machines” in Representations (2024), “Babbage, Lovelace and the Dawn of the Ludic Age” in Game Studies (2024), “Philosophy is an Egyptian Game: How Ancient Game Logics Structure Our Present” in ROMchip (2023), and the co-authored “Project Quintessence: Examining Textual Dimensionality with a Dynamic Corpus Explorer” in Digital Humanities Quarterly (2023). As a digital humanities practitioner, he co-developed Project Quintessence, integrating machine learning with dynamic visualizations for archival research. At NYU, Pizelo taught MCCGE 2131: Topics in Digital Media: Games Studies. He has delivered over thirty presentations at conferences such as DiGRA, SLSA, 4S, SIGCIS, IS4SI, and MLA. Among his honors are the UC Davis Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award (2023), Englund Dissertation Year Fellowship (2023–2024), and Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts NSF Travel Grant (2023).