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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March 2025

March 24, 2025

Evan Selinger, professor in the Department of Philosophy, gave the keynote address at the Law Enforcement Technologies: The Realm of Facial Recognition conference, held on March 13 and 14 at Côte d’Azur University in Nice, France. The keynote address, “Normalizing Facial Recognition Technology and the End of Obscurity,” discussed the profound risk to privacy posed by facial recognition technology, including in countries protected by the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act.
March 19, 2025

Eun Sook Kwon, associate professor in the School of Communication, co-authored the study “What drives addiction on social media sites? The relationships between psychological well-being states, social media addiction, brand addiction and impulse buying on social media,” published in Computers in Human Behavior. The research examines how psychological well-being affects social media addiction and consumer behavior. The study was mentioned in The New York Times article “What Does it Take to Quit Shopping?”
March 14, 2025

Evelyn Brister, professor in the Department of Philosophy, presented her book, A Watershed Moment: The American West in the Age of Limits, as part of the Dean’s Distinguished Lecture Series at Colorado State University’s Warner College of Natural Resources. She also spoke at the Western Places/Western Spaces conference, discussing sustainable community planning.

February 2025

February 28, 2025

Jeffrey Wagner, professor of economics, and alumnus Michael Dortz published “Raising Rivals’ Costs and Right to Repair Laws: Separating the Sheep from the Goats?” in the Journal of Regulatory Economics. In addition, Wagner and alumni Nick Leary and Michael Zunino published “The Marginal Abatement Cost Function with Secondary Waste Markets” in Ecological Economics.
February 28, 2025

Jonathan Schroeder, the William A. Kern Professor of Communications, presented “Simple! Fast! Modern! Fun! Taking the Road to Success with Midcentury Self-Improvement Records” at Palm Springs Modernism Week, an annual festival highlighting midcentury modern architecture, art, interior design, landscape design, and vintage culture.
February 19, 2025

Priti Kalsi, associate professor of economics, co-authored “The Gilded Age and Beyond: The Persistence of Elite Wealth in American History,” which was recently highlighted on NPR’s Planet Money as one of “5 economic papers that lit up our brains.” The study finds that while the wealthiest individuals tend to drop in rankings over time, having a wealthy grandparent significantly increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1 percent.
February 12, 2025

Silvia Benso, professor of philosophy and director of the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program, presented “The (Im)potentiality of Embodied Geographies in Lea Melandri’s Love and Violence” at the Women and Italian Contemporary Theory speaker series on Feb. 7 at the University of Toronto. Her talk explored Melandri’s feminist activism as a practice of love and resistance against institutionalized violence.
February 12, 2025

Signatures, RIT’s student-run art and literary magazine, has been recognized as a REALM First Class magazine, the highest distinction awarded by the National Council of Teachers of English. This year, 422 student magazines from 46 states and five countries were nominated. The Signatures editorial team includes students from various disciplines across campus.
February 7, 2025

Caroline DeLong, professor of psychology, and Logan Brownell ’24 (psychology), published “Hand Preferences in Olive Baboons During Cognitive Performance on Match-to-Sample Tasks and Natural Behaviors” in the American Journal of Primatology in January. Portions of this work were done as Brownell’s senior project in psychology and involved research assistants in the Comparative Cognition and Perception Lab.
February 6, 2025

Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, was part of a global collaboration, Many Eco Evo Analysts, which conducted an experiment where more than 200 researchers made their own decisions about how to analyze a dataset. Their findings about reproducibility in ecology and biology, “Same data, different analysts: variation in effect sizes due to analytical decisions in ecology and evolutionary biology,” were published in BMC Biology. The study was also showcased in Nature.