Newsmakers | College of Liberal Arts

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 3, 2025

Shay Ryan Olmstead, lecturer in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, was co-winner of the 2025 William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize, which recognizes the best dissertation in any area of American legal history.
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.

November 2025

November 19, 2025

Shay Ryan Olmstead, lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts, published the article "I’m Not Sleazy and I Don’t Frequent Bars”: Respectability as a Legal Strategy in Transsexual Employment Discrimination Lawsuits, 1971-1995" in the Journal of American Constitutional History. The article was also presented at the American Society for Legal History’s annual meeting in Detroit.
November 17, 2025

Kelley Holley, assistant professor in the School of Performing Arts, led the panel “Non-Major Education in Theatre and Performance Studies” at the American Society of Theatre Research Conference on Nov. 8 in Denver.
November 14, 2025

Jessica Hardin, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, will co-lead the workshop “Metabolic (in)justice: Toward a biosocial anthropology of nourishment in an era of ecological unraveling” in New Orleans. This is funded by a Wenner Gren Foundation Workshop Grant bringing together scholars from the United States, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia in November.
November 14, 2025

Richard Fadok, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Kaitlin Stack Whitney, associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, participated in the first meeting of the New York Animal Studies Working Group on Oct. 24 at Cornell University.
November 14, 2025

Katie Bednarcyk, Spectrum Support Program specialist, and PR Griffis, Counseling and Psychological Services intern, presented “Pathways to Practice: Supporting Students and Developing Professionals through the Spectrum Support Program's Graduate Internship” at the College Autism Summit in Pittsburgh.
November 14, 2025

Daeun Shin, adjunct faculty in Writing Programs and Modern Languages and Cultures; Kévin Le Blévec, modern languages technology specialist; and Michael Winans, specialist in applied linguistics in the English Language Center, co-hosted and presented at Upstate CALL, a conference focused on computer-assisted language learning, along with other scholars from Upstate New York and around the world.