Biography
Amy Stornaiuolo is professor of literacy education and chair of the Learning, Teaching, and Literacies Division at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Her research examines how digital platforms, networked technologies, and generative AI are transforming authorship, literacy, and learning across schools and online communities. She also serves as faculty director of the Philadelphia Writing Project and faculty director of Gutmann College House.
Prior to joining the Penn GSE faculty, Dr. Stornaiuolo taught postsecondary composition and reading in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she studied transfer of learning across contexts and the social construction of remediation in community colleges. Since then, she has collaborated with educators, schools, and community organizations to investigate writing, authorship, and learning in an increasingly mediated world. She teaches courses on writing, authorship, and digital literacies; literacy research; generative AI; and digital research methods.
Dr. Stornaiuolo serves on the Board of Directors of the Literacy Research Association and is former editor of Research in the Teaching of English, the flagship research journal of the National Council of Teachers of English. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and recognized with awards for research on digital literacies and writing.
Education
- Ph.D. (Education) University of California, Berkeley, 2012
- M.A. (Composition & Rhetoric) San Francisco State University, 2005
- M.A. (English Literature) Mills College, 1996
- B.A. (English Literature) University of San Francisco, 1992
Areas of Expertise
- Literacy and learning in adolescence and adulthood
- Digital literacies
- Writing
- Teachers, youth, and social media
- Education in global contexts
- Platforms and AI
- Literature
Links
Academic Programs
Literacy Studies, Ed.D. Literacy Studies, M.S.Ed. Literacy Studies, Ph.D. Reading Specialist CertificationResearch Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Stornaiuolo's research explores how authorship is reconfigured in a world where writing increasingly unfolds through relationships among people, platforms, algorithms, and texts. Informed by sociomaterial and postdigital perspectives, she examines how literacy practices emerge through the dynamic interactions of human and technological actors, asking how digital infrastructures shape participation, identity, expertise, and the circulation of knowledge. Her work combines qualitative, participatory, and computational approaches to study writing across classrooms, online communities, and large-scale digital platforms.
Committed to designing equitable and humanizing opportunities for learning, Dr. Stornaiuolo works in long-term partnership with educators and communities to understand how young people become critical, creative, and civically engaged authors. Rather than treating technologies as neutral tools, her research investigates how the design of platforms, AI systems, and digital infrastructures shapes (and constrains) possibilities for learning, collaboration, and public participation. Across her scholarship, she seeks to design and study learning environments that support more just, inclusive, and ethical forms of authorship and communication.
Dr. Stornaiuolo has led numerous research projects examining writing and learning across schools and online communities, including studies of school makerspaces, youth digital authoring, teachers' inquiry with technology, and adolescents' data literacy. Recent projects include the Digital Discourse Project, a McDonnell Foundation-funded study of teachers' facilitation of online literature discussions; Write4Change, a participatory study of a global youth writing community dedicated to social change; and Writing with AI (WAi), a qualitative study of how young people learn and write with generative AI.
Her newest line of research is investigating how digital authoring platforms—including fan fiction communities and AI-mediated writing environments—are transforming contemporary authorship through computational and qualitative analyses of large-scale platform data. The Platformed Authorship project involves a mixed-methods design that pairs historicizing literacy interviews with computational analyses of fan fiction and other large-scale authoring platforms, examining how digital infrastructures shape writers' trajectories, practices, and understandings of authorship over time.
Publications
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Journal Editorial Board
Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy
Editorial Board
Learning, Media, and Technology
Editorial Board
Literate Activity: Perspectives on Textual Practices in the World
Editorial Board
Research in the Teaching of English
Editorial Board
Written Communication
Editorial Board