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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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.
November 14, 2025

Jeffrey Wagner, professor in the Department of Economics, received the New York State Economics Association Distinguished Fellow award at its annual meeting on Nov. 8.
November 12, 2025

Evelyn Brister, professor and program director in the Department of Philosophy, will be speaking at the 2025 NetEthics Conference hosted by the University of Minnesota's Consortium on Law and Values at 3:45 p.m. EST, on Friday, Nov. 14. Brister will appear on a roundtable panel where scholars will share their expertise in creating ethical and responsible research networks. The conference is free and open to the public.
November 12, 2025

Richard Fadok, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, spoke at the 2025 Virtual Summit of the Bird Collision Prevention Alliance, an international coalition of government agencies, conservation groups, scientists, architects, industry leaders, and engaged community members committed to making the built environment safe for birds. His talk, “Teaching the Crisis: Reflections on a Feral Pedagogy,” reflected on the opportunities and challenges of addressing bird-window collisions in undergraduate courses across disciplines, including his spring 2026 Vertically Integrated Project, Smash the Crash.
November 7, 2025

Christine Keiner, chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, published “The Nuclear Sea-Level Canal Engineering Feasibility Field Studies and Epistemic Risk in the Darién, 1965–1970” in a special issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge, exploring the theme “Knowledge and Power: Projecting the Modern World.”