Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Chris Mustazza

Co-Director, PennSound

Sr. Director of Academic Computing

2019 Ph.D. Graduate
Dissertation Advisor(s): Charles Bernstein
"Speech Labs: Language Experiments, Early Poetry Audio Archives, and the Poetic Record"

Co-Director of the PennSound Archive, IT Director at Penn's School of Arts & Sciences

Office Hours

fall 2023

Mondays, 12-1pm 

Tuesdays, 5-6pm

On Zoom, in-person by appointment

Chris Mustazza's work centers on the poetry audio archive and digital analyses of sound recordings of poets reading their own work. His current book manuscript, tentatively titled Speech Labs: Language Experiments, Early Poetry Audio Archives, and the Poetic Record, is the first history of the poetry audio archive, detailing how poets' voices came be to collected, valued, and defined during the early period of sound recording. This project includes his work to digitize and contextualize the first collection of poetry recordings in the U.S., The Speech Lab Recordings. As part of this work, he has edited the earliest recordings of Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson, and Gertrude Stein (among others). 

Mustazza also designs digital tools for analyzing the performance of poetry, working at the intersection of literary studies and linguistics methodologies. His concept of Machine-Aided Close Listening is described in Digital Humanities Quarterly and has been discussed in reference to the history computational approaches to prosody. He is interested in tools that can provide new opportunities for close listening, as well as machine-listening and artificial intelligence approaches to the analysis of audio corpora. 

He is the Co-Director of the PennSound archive, alongside Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein, as well as director of computing for the academic departments and research centers in Penn's School of Arts & Sciences. During the academic year 2019-2020, he is a Research Fellow at the Linguistics Data Consortium, working on a second book-length project titled Doin' Voices: Modern Poetry's Sonic Genres

Courses Taught

fall 2024

spring 2024

fall 2023

ENGL 0765.301 Podcasting  

spring 2023

fall 2022

ENGL 0765.301 Podcasting  

spring 2022

fall 2021

ENGL 210.302 Podcasting  

spring 2021

ENGL 088.601 Modern American Poetry  

fall 2019

fall 2018

fall 2016

ENGL 103.205 Comics and Graphic Novels