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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October 2021

October 22, 2021

Evelyn Brister, professor of philosophy and president of the Public Philosophy Network, co-organized the Network’s sixth annual conference, “Engagement, Policy, and Practice,” which is taking place Oct. 21-23. The conference will connect more than 120 philosophers and practitioners who will engage issues of public concern by working collaboratively with civic and professional communities. Three plenary sessions are free and open to the public. The sessions explore the themes of climate and the environment, science and technology for the public good, and bioethics and public philosophy.
October 11, 2021

Yunn-Shan Ma, assistant professor of the Department of Performing Arts, with the RIT Philharmonic Orchestra was awarded an Honorable Mention in Orchestra Performance at the American Prize 2021. Ma was named a finalist in the Conducting Competition and a semifinalist for the Vytautas Marijosius Memorial Award for Conductors' Orchestral Programming.
October 7, 2021

Jonathan Schroeder, the William A. Kern Professor of Communications, published Designed for Dancing: How Midcentury Records Taught America to Dance (MIT Press) in October 2021. The book, co-authored with Janet Borgerson, features a visually compelling collection of vintage dance records from a golden age of album cover design and discusses their contribution to the story of American identity.
October 4, 2021

Hinda Mandell, associate professor in the School of Communication, has been invited to join the international editorial board of The Journal of Arts & Communities, one of only two board members from the U.S.

September 2021

September 10, 2021

Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, principal lecturer in the Department of English, published her collected volume dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov’s inflammatory masterpiece, Lolita, titled Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era. The book asks, “how do we read a novel that describes an unpardonable crime? How do we balance analysis of Lolita’s brilliant language and aesthetic complexity with due attention to its troubling content?”
September 10, 2021

Christine Kray, professor, and Uli Linke, chair, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, co-edited Race, Gender, and Political Culture in the Trump Era: The Fascist Allure, published by Routledge (2021). This book demonstrates the fragility of democratic norms and institutions, and the allure of fascist politics within the Trump era. The chapters consider the antagonistic cultural practices through which divergent political machinations are staged, and examine the corresponding policies and governing practices that threaten the civil rights, security, and well-being of racialized minorities, immigrants, women, and gender nonconforming people.

August 2021

August 31, 2021

Rain Bosworth, assistant professor in the Department of Liberal Studies at NTID, was awarded $250,000 by the James S. McDonnell Foundation for a three-year research project titled “Do Tactile Exploratory Behaviors Predict Language Development in Deaf Signing Children?” This work is done in collaboration with Allison Fitch, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology; Matthew Dye, associate professor at NTID; and Guoyu Lu, assistant professor in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science.
August 30, 2021

Silvia Benso, professor of philosophy and director of the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program, published Contemporary Italian Women Philosophers: Stretching the Art of Thinking (SUNY Press). The co-edited volume offers a unique portrayal of the theoretical positions of 11 Italian women thinkers who share the practice of philosophy while extending philosophical work and interests beyond the realm of the discipline strictly defined.
August 23, 2021

Farhad Akhbardeh, a computing and information sciences Ph.D. student, published a paper at the ACL-IJCNLP 2021 main conference on “Handling Extreme Class Imbalance in Technical Logbook Datasets,” together with Associate Professor Cecilia Alm, Assistant Professor Marcos Zampieri, and Associate Professor Travis Desell, who are affiliated with the computing and information sciences Ph.D. program.
August 10, 2021

Qing Miao, assistant professor in the Department of Public Policy, was awarded a $62,600 grant for her research, “Does Preparedness Reduce Losses from Coastal Hazards? An Empirical Study of U.S. Counties.” This research is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of New Hampshire Coastal Response Research Center.