Newsmakers

Highlighting the professional and academic accomplishments of College of Liberal Arts students, faculty, and staff.

Newsmakers are a quick and easy way to acknowledge the professional and academic accomplishments of RIT students, faculty, and staff, such as publishing an article in a scholarly journal, presenting research at a conference, serving on a panel discussion, earning a scholarship, or winning an award. Newsmakers appear in News and Events as well as the "In the News" section on faculty/staff directory profile pages.

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December 2025

  • December 15, 2025

    Erica Haskell, director, and Ben Willmott, director of operations and administration, in the School of Performing Arts, appeared on “In The Spotlight,” a television program in the town of Penfield. The interview focuses on RIT’s development of a non-major performing arts ecosystem through the continued growth of the Performing Arts Scholarship program.

  • December 10, 2025

    Katrina Overby, assistant professor in the School of Communication, presented on two panels at the 111th annual National Communication Association Convention in Denver. At the convention, Overby assumed the role of chair of the African American Communication and Culture Division, following her term as vice chair.

  • December 8, 2025

    Christopher Schwartz, research scientist in the Department of Cybersecurity, and Matthew Wright, O’Sullivan Professor and chair of the Department of Cybersecurity, along with Andrea Hickerson, former director of RIT's School of Communication and current dean of the School of Journalism and New Media at University of Mississippi, published the book Fake-Checking: A Journalist’s Guide to Deepfakes. It serves as a practical reference for journalists and advanced media students who are increasingly required to identify and verify potential deepfakes and their future iterations. The guide aims to assist journalists in understanding the complexities of deepfakes from several angles, including philosophical, historical, technical, and methodological. 

  • December 8, 2025

    Jessica Hardin, associate professor of sociology and anthropology; Katie Healey, adjunct faculty member in science, technology, and society; Kristoffer Whitney, associate professor in science, technology, and society; and Kaitlin Stack Whitney, associate professor in science, technology, and society, co-published the article “Design, Disability, and Critical Pedagogy in STS” in the journal Science, Technology, & Human Values. The article, which was co-published by Anna Carter ’25 (sociology and anthropology, biomedical engineering), Lee Smith ’24 (individualized study, sociology and anthropology), and Angeline Hamele ’25 BS (sociology and anthropology), MFA (industrial design) explores how the design of course assignments, curricula, classrooms, and buildings imagines particular learners and ways of being and how STS can provide liberatory ways to interrogate and intervene to make more inclusive, expansive futures in higher education and beyond.

  • December 5, 2025

    Divya Ramjee, assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, co-authored “From ransoms to ruin: Are extortion payments by ransomware victims insurable?" The study supports the claim that extortion payments by ransomware victims should not be considered insurable by cyber insurance providers that use assumptions of classical ruin theory in their solvency determinations, encouraging an evidence-based approach for creating and applying cyber risk solvency standards by insurance regulators to ransomware-related extortion payments. 

  • December 3, 2025

    Jessica Hardin, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, co-edited Savoring Care: Rethinking Life with Type 2 Diabetes, which reframes what it means to live with a chronic illness too often narrated through blame, surveillance, and individual responsibility. Savoring Care examines how people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes build wellness through everyday acts of nourishment, reciprocity, and community.

  • December 3, 2025

    Richard Fadok, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, presented “Commodity Animism: On the Magic of Mimesis in American Biomimicry” at the 2025 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. His talk was featured on a panel which he co-organized, called “The Ghosts of Contemporary Environmentalisms.” He also co-organized and participated on the roundtable “Towards an Anthropology of Architecture.”

  • December 1, 2025

    Silvia Benso, professor in the Department of Philosophy and director of the women's, gender, and sexuality studies program, organized and chaired the international scholarly panel held at the Society for Italian Philosophy meeting on Oct. 18. The panel, “Thinking with Silvia Federici: Marxism, Materialist Feminism, and the Practice of the Commons,” featured leading Italian feminist scholar, theoretician, and activist Silvia Federici, emerita at Hofstra University and author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation.