Keynote Panelists
Travis Bartley is a fourth year doctoral student in the Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, researching critical digital infrastructure and language technology. His work seeks to interrogate the equity possible in communication technologies and reconcile their limitations with public need. As well, his work often engages with issues in the public humanities, with his essay “Executing the Crisis: The Humanities Beyond Austerity” being published in the forthcoming Digital Futures of Graduate Studies in the Humanities. He has served as a Data for Public Good Fellow, been a recipient of a CUNY Humanities Alliance Fellowship, and interned with the NVIDIA Corporation as language technology researcher.
Stephen Brier is an emeritus professor in the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, where he taught courses on the history of public education. He founded the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program at the Graduate Center in 2002 and the New Media Lab. He is a historian who has published widely on issues ranging from U.S. social and labor history to the uses of digital technologies and tools to improve academic teaching, learning, and research. He was also the founding director of the Graduate Center’s American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (which he headed for eighteen years) and the executive producer of the project’s award-winning “Who Built America?” multimedia curriculum, including textbooks, videos, and CD-ROMs. He has co-produced other award-winning websites, including History Matters and the September 11 Digital Archive.
Nicole Cote is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY, who works at the intersection of environmental and digital media, feminist STS, and knowledge generation. She is also keen to find ways to make science and tech topics more accessible, digestible, and meaningful to a wider audience especially through creative applications. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute iSchool, an Adjunct at Queens College, and a Graduate Researcher at the New Media Lab, CUNY. Previously, she has served as a Data for Public Good Fellow and an Open Pedagogy Fellow at CUNY. Her research has been supported by the New Media Lab, Graduate Center Digital Initiatives (GCDI),Mina Rees Library, and Provost’s Office at CUNY as well as by the New York City Digital Humanities organization (NYCDH).
Matthew K. Gold is Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center, where he holds teaching appointments in the Ph.D. Program in English; the M.A. Programs in Digital Humanities and Liberal Studies; the M.S. Program in Data Analysis and Visualization; and the doctoral certificate programs in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and American Studies. He serves as Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, and he is Director of the M.A. Program in Digital Humanities and the M.S. Program in Data Analysis and Visualization. He also founded and directs the CUNY Academic Commons and the GC Digital Scholarship Lab. He edited Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minnesota, 2012) and, with Lauren F. Klein (with whom he is co- editor of the Debates in the Digital Humanities book series), co-edited Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 and Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. His collaborative digital humanities projects, including Looking for Whitman, Commons In A Box (with the CUNY Academic Commons team), Social Paper (with Erin Glass), DH Box (with Stephen Zweibel), and Manifold Scholarship (with Doug Armato, Susan Doerr, Zach Davis, and the Manifold Team) have been supported by grants from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.
Laurie Hurson is an Open Educational Technologist in the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center where she supports faculty with integrating open pedagogical strategies into their courses such as teaching with open educational resources and on The CUNY Academic Commons. She is a PhD Candidate in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center and her research explores students’ learning ecologies and how these resource networks shape student learning. She has taught Psychology and New Media courses at CUNY’s Baruch and John Jay colleges. Previously, Laurie was a Graduate Fellow at the GC TLC and a Hybrid Coordinator at Baruch College’s Center for Teaching and Learning.
Stefano Morello is a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY and a Digital Fellow at City College, CUNY. 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 with architectural historian Kerri Culhane 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 they curated 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.
Zach Muhlbauer is a third-year student in the English Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where he explores digital pedagogy in the context of networked learning and new literacy studies. His research strives to forge new outlets for open infrastructure and data sovereignty within public higher education. In addition to his work as an OpenCUNY Co-Coordinator and HASTAC Scholar at the Graduate Center, he serves as a Teaching Fellow at Baruch College and a Workshop Series Facilitator at Queens College. He is a graduate of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, and recently joined the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Previously, he has served as a Digital Humanities Consultant and Instructional Support Assistant at the State University of New York at Geneseo, where he co-developed an OER-based online writing course for prospective students in the college’s first-year writing program.
Luke Waltzer is the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he supports GC students in their teaching across the CUNY system and beyond, and works on a variety of pedagogical and digital projects. He previously was the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Baruch College. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Center, serves as Director of Community Projects for the CUNY Academic Commons, is a faculty member in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program and MA Program in Digital Humanities, and co-directs the CUNY Humanities Alliance. He serves on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and has contributed essays to Matthew K. Gold’s Debates in the Digital Humanities and, with Thomas Harbison, to Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki’s Writing History in the Digital Age.
Featured Creative Presenters
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is an award-winning associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on racial literacy in teacher education, Black girl literacies, and Black and Latinx male high school students. A sought-after speaker on issues of race, culturally responsive pedagogy, and diversity, Sealey-Ruiz works with K-12 and higher education school communities to increase their racial literacy knowledge and move toward more equitable school experiences for their Black and Latinx students. Sealey-Ruiz appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright”, a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou. She is co-author (with Detra Price-Dennis) of Advancing Racial Literacy in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces (2021), co-editor of three academic books, and author of two books of poetry: Love from the Vortex & Other Poems (2020) and The Peace Chronicles (2021). Please visit her website at yolandasealeyruiz.com and directly contact her at archofselfllc@gmail.com.
Dr. Anderson P. Smith, born and raised in The Bronx, New York, teaches creative writing and spoken word poetry in medium and maximum-security prisons through the organization Rehabilitation Through the Arts, where he also serves as diversity, equity, and inclusion facilitator. He has conducted seminars and lectures in various conferences, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA), National Association of Foreign Student Advisers (NAFSA), and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), around literacy and metacognition. He is currently researching the effects of literature when used in service to people with criminal conviction histories post-incarceration. Smith earned his Ph.D. in English education from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is currently a professor at Hunter College in New York. He teaches Introduction to Urban Education: Topics and Issues around Diversity and Equity and Methods in Teaching of Writing.
