Newsmakers

September 28, 2023

Katrina Overby, assistant professor in the School of Communication, was a keynote panelist during the Black Visual Culture, Black Visual Life Symposium on Sept. 29, hosted by the University of Rochester’s Frederick Douglass Institute and Department of Black Studies. Her presentation, “The Future of our Past: On Radical Reimagining and Mediated Black Futures,” argues for the importance and complication of Black mediated futures and resistance.

September 28, 2023

Christine Keiner, professor and chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, is featured in the trailer of the documentary A Passion for Oysters, which premiered at the Chesapeake Film Festival on Sept. 30. The documentary, directed by David Harp, draws upon Keiner’s book, The Oyster Question, and other sources to explore why “the passion for this humble shellfish has inspired shooting wars, piracy, social and environmental conflict, and libraries of legislation for more than two centuries.”

September 21, 2023

Two RIT teams participated in the 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2023), held Sept. 10-13 at the MIT Media Lab. Anisha Ashwath ’23 MS (computer science) and Michael Peechatt ’13 (software engineering), ’21 MS (computer science), a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, authored the paper “Early vs. Late Multimodal Fusion for Recognizing Confusion in Collaborative Tasks” with Cecilia Alm, professor in the Department of Psychology, and Reynold Bailey, professor in the Department of Computer Science. Jordan Quinn, a computer science student, presented a demo on “MDE – Multimodal Data Explorer for Flexible Visualization of Multiple Data Streams.” Team members included Isabelle Arthur, a computer science student; Rajesh Titung, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student; Alm; and Bailey.

September 15, 2023

Elisabetta Sanino DAmanda, principal lecturer of Italian and coordinator of the Italian studies program, published her article “Porpora e le altre. Porpora Marcasciano si racconta” (“Porpora and the Others, Porpora Marcasciano Tells Her Story”) in the volume Mediterraneo e dialoghi di intercultura tra pandemie e guerra (Mediterranean and Intercultural Dialogues Between Pandemics and War) (Bordighera Press, 2023).

September 15, 2023

Eunju Kang, senior lecturer of public policy, presented her research on public health policy and participated in the Teaching and Learning Conference at the 119th American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, held Aug. 31-Sept. 3 in Los Angeles.

September 7, 2023

Rebecca Scales, associate professor of history, presented a paper on “Border Crossings: Negotiating the 1930 polio epidemic in the Franco-German Borderlands” at the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health on Aug. 30 in Oslo, Norway.

September 6, 2023

Joseph M. Henning, associate professor in the Department of History, published an article on “Defending the Samurai: Alice Mabel Bacon and Meiji Japan at War” in the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal. In July, he gave a public lecture about this project at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University.

September 5, 2023

David S. Martins, associate professor of rhetoric in the Department of English, along with Xiaoye You (Penn State) and Brooke R. Schrieber (Baruch College, CUNY) had their co-edited collection of essays, Writing on the Wall: Writing Education and Resistance to Isolationism, published by Utah State University Press. For the collection, “writing on the wall” serves as a creative metaphor for the direct action writing education can provide and invokes border spaces as sites of identity expression, belonging, and resistance.

August 29, 2023

Rebecca Scales, associate professor of history, is a co-PI with Andrea Stanton of the University of Denver and Alejandra Bronfman of SUNY Albany on a $50,000 National Endowment for the Humanities collaborative research grant titled “Radio & Decolonization Around the Globe, 1920-Present.” The grant will fund a conference next summer at the University of Denver featuring 30 international scholars interested in radio’s contributions to decolonizing processes around the globe.

August 29, 2023

Rebecca A.R. Edwards, professor of history, gave a public lecture on “Of Seas, Silence, and Signs: The Deaf Community of Martha’s Vineyard in the World of Maritime New England,” on July 20 at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum in Tisbury, Mass. The lecture was part of the programming in support of the museum’s new exhibit, “They Were Heard: The Unique Voice of the Martha’s Vineyard Deaf Community.” Edwards’ scholarly work on the Vineyard Deaf community will appear as part of the forthcoming book, written with co-author Eric Nystrom, Ordinary Lives: Recovering Deaf Social History through the American Census (January 2024).