Newsmakers

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 5, 2025

    Divya Ramjee, assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice, co-authored “From ransoms to ruin: Are extortion payments by ransomware victims insurable?" The study supports the claim that extortion payments by ransomware victims should not be considered insurable by cyber insurance providers that use assumptions of classical ruin theory in their solvency determinations, encouraging an evidence-based approach for creating and applying cyber risk solvency standards by insurance regulators to ransomware-related extortion payments. 

  • 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 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.