Rate My Professor Samuel Pizelo

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).