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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April 2023

April 21, 2023

Jessica Hardin, assistant professor of anthropology, published the article “Moving materialities: Oceanic epistemologies and embodied knowledge production in Pentecostal women's health mentorship in Samoa” in American Anthropologist. The article employs Oceanic epistemological theories to explore the body as a site of knowledge production among Samoan Pentecostal women as they dance in a church-sponsored Zumba session, tracking foods, words, and feelings. It calls for orient critical studies of health to interrogate the dynamic qualities of materiality, including both the moving body and materials that move between or within bodies.
April 20, 2023

Karen “Ren” vanMeenen, senior lecturer in the Department of English, presented “Using Graphic Novels to Enhance Social Emotional Learning” for Rochester School District elementary faculty and staff on April 12.
April 13, 2023

Bruce Austin, professor in the School of Communication, authored “The First Traveling Art Exhibition,” published in Western New York Heritage (Spring, 2023). The essay is based on research conducted for his book A Symbiotic Partnership: Marrying Commerce to Education at Gustav Stickley’s 1903 Arts & Crafts Exhibitions (RIT Press, 2022).
April 7, 2023

Yuhan Huang, assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures, gave a talk about “Literature in the Age of #MeToo: Retelling Sexual Violence in Fang Si-chi’s First Love Paradise and its Reception,” for the Chinese Studies Colloquium at Purdue University on March 20.
April 7, 2023

Amit Batabyal, the Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics and interim head of the Department of Sustainability, presented papers about centralized vs. decentralized water pollution control in the Ganges, optimal mask wearing in office environments, and strategic competition between vaccine-producing firms, in the annual conference of the Southern Regional Science Association in Savannah, Ga., March 31-April 1.
April 6, 2023

Jeffrey Burnette, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Matthew Gregg, senior economist, Center for Indian Country Development, had their work cited by The Brookings Institution in the research report “Why the federal government needs to change how it collects data on Native Americans.”
April 6, 2023

Jonathan Schroeder, William A. Kern Professor of Communications, was an invited keynote speaker and panelist at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media's conference on Integrated Marketing Communications on March 30-31 in Oxford, Miss.

March 2023

March 31, 2023

Sandra Rothenberg, professor of management and chair of the Department of Public Policy, and Charlotte Lefkovich ’18 (mechanical engineering) ’18 MS (science, technology, and public policy) had a paper, “Identification of predicate creep under the 510(k) process: A case study of a robotic surgical device,” published in the journal PLOS ONE.
March 31, 2023

Eric Hittinger, associate professor in the Department of Public Policy, and Eric Williams, professor in the Department of Sustainability, were recently awarded a $265,000 National Science Foundation grant for a research project titled “CAS-Climate: Linking Activities, Expenditures and Energy Use into an Integrated Systems Model to Understand and Predict Energy Futures.” This is part of a collaborative project with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology that is focused on understanding the large-scale interactions between behavior and energy use across the United States, with the goal of answering questions about the energy system implications of trends like telework, online shopping, or increased urban density.
March 31, 2023

Rebecca Houston, professor of psychology, mentored four psychology students who presented their research at the annual Eastern Psychological Association meeting March 2-4 in Boston. Olivia Bo Allaby presented her work on cognitive reserve, aging, executive functioning, and memory; Finn Cohen presented his research on emotion regulation and Cluster B personality disorders; Romiere Horace presented his research on gender, moral emotions, and trauma; and Jeremiah Ramkissoon presented his work on internet-related addictions, impulsivity, gender, and socioeconomic status.