Spring Semester 2025

As we have launched into the spring semester, I’m reflecting on the privilege of traveling to Chennai, India, to attend a summit on artificial intelligence organized by the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT). The hospitality of the campus was like none I’ve ever experienced, and the discussions and enthusiasm for collaboration was inspiring.

I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to collaborate further with the faculty at VIT and to introduce them to our colleagues in the College of Liberal Arts. I also mention this here because in interactive sessions with the Indian students, the first questions asked of all the RIT Deans were about our College of Liberal Arts programs. 

This experience not only emphasized the global reach of RIT but also highlighted the strength of what we are offering in the college. Another sign of our strength, as highlighted in this newsletter, is that our graduates not only achieve financial success but also make meaningful contributions to their communities, including the RIT community.

Our distinguished alums Julie Tiddbit Feldman and Shane Feldman are exceptional examples of this as well as the College of Liberal Arts grads who were such a large percentage of those recognized recently on the Rochester Business Journal 40 Under 40 List. 

As always, this semester we have a lot of work to do as a college to continuing growing and achieving new goals, but this work feels less daunting and more heartening when we reflect on how far we have come and what we have already accomplished.

To kick off the AI conference, the VIT founder and Chancellor Dr. Govindasamy Viswanathan quoted Henry Ford “Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, and working together is success.”

I look forward to us working together this semester as a college this semester.   
— Kelly Norris Martin, Ph.D., Dean of the RIT College of Liberal Arts

Co-led by Museum Studies Program Director Juilee Decker and the RIT Xerox chair in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, the Cultural Heritage Imaging, Preservation, and Research Project is among a select set of five projects supported by RIT’s new Vertically Integrated Project Initiative.

Linguists face a resource gap for studying visual prosody and its grammatical and emotional functions in sign languages, and for creating AI systems capable of processing visual prosody. Cecilia Alm and Allison Fitch, College of Liberal Arts faculty members affiliated with RIT’s Ph.D. program in Cognitive Science, aim to fill that gap through Deaf scientist-centered research.