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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June 2021

  • June 22, 2021

    Jessica Hardin, assistant professor of anthropology, was awarded two grants. The Wenner Gren grant ($19,700) supports a collaborative and virtual methodology for conducting safe COVID-19 fieldwork about diabetes complications experiences in Samoa. Hardin is a Co-PI on the second grant from the Templeton Foundation ($233,000) titled “Encountering the Divine: Developing a Framework of Religious Intelligence” to support a comparative project based in the United States, Samoa, Thailand, and Ecuador.

  • June 15, 2021

    Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society, presented at the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government “Local Government Lab” symposium on June 9.

  • June 4, 2021

    Hinda Mandell, associate professor in the School of Communication, published “‘Monstrous’ Craft Activism: A City Yarn Installation that Wrought Controversy through Textile Togetherness and Community Engagement” in the journal Craft Research. The article focuses on a public-art event in Rochester’s Schiller Park.

  • June 2, 2021

    RIT’s Center for Engaged Storycraft received a program grant from the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation New ERA Women Writers Program to launch a summer workshop for young women in 11th and 12th grades this July. “Gathering Stories: A Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Women” features local Rochester instructors, guest storytellers, and RIT student facilitators, and will be free to 20 accepted participants from around the Rochester area.

  • June 2, 2021

    Laura Shackelford, professor of English and director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft, published Surreal Entanglements: Essays on Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction in Routledge Press’s World Literature and Environment series. Co-edited with Louise Economides, this book explores the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s speculative fiction.

May 2021

  • May 26, 2021

    Rebecca DeRoo, associate professor in the School of Communication, co-edited the May 2021 thematic issue of the journal Camera Obscura. Titled “Future Varda,” the issue analyzes the feminist filmmaker's living legacy. DeRoo presented related research at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in March.

  • May 14, 2021

    Silvia Benso, professor of philosophy and director of the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program, was the co-organizer (with Professor Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio, University of Rochester) of a three-day international symposium April 16-18 on Dante’s Political Thought at the Crossroad of Arts and Sciences. The event, supported by a grant from the Central New York Humanities Corridor, featured panelists from Argentina, Canada, Germany, Italy, Peru, and the United States.

  • May 11, 2021

    Christine Kray, professor of anthropology, presented a paper on “War, Transmuted; Or, Lords of the Land and Landlords: Maya Leaders and Mahogany Companies at the Edge of Yucatán’s Social War, 1847-1872,” at the “Ethnohistory and Afrohistory at the Ends/Center of the World: Belize and Its Neighbors” symposium at Pennsylvania State University on April 2.