Zach Muhlbauer / English
Graduate Student Researcher
Started at the NML: February 2025zmuhlbauer@gradcenter.cuny.eduzmuhl.bsky.social on Blue Skyzmuhls on GitHubmilwright on Hugging Face
Fellow, Teaching & Learning Center | Assistant Curricular Lead, Critical AI Literacy Institute
Zach is a sixth-year PhD candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where his research intersects digital rhetoric, new literacy studies, and critical infrastructure studies. His dissertation investigates how emergent social platforms, such as Reddit and Discord, reshape literacy and commoning practices and enable collaborative scenes of writing, reading, and learning in higher education. Zach also explores the application of digital humanities pedagogy and generative artificial intelligence in educational settings, with a focus on code generators and purpose-driven inference tools. At the New Media Lab, Zach is exploring large language models within local development environments and has recently begun beta-testing a multimodal OCR tool designed to assist researchers in transcribing interleaved texts and images from historical documents, archival materials, and more.
Recent digital projects: