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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August 2020

August 25, 2020

Eun Sook Kwon, an assistant professor of advertising in the School of Communication, had an article, “Impact of Media Context on Advertising Memory: A Meta-Analysis of Advertising Effectiveness,” voted Best Academic Paper of 2019 by the Journal of Advertising Research’s editorial board.
August 25, 2020

Nickesia Gordon, associate professor in the School of Communication, received the top paper award from the African American Communication and Culture Division of the National Communication Association in the division for her paper, “Discourses of Consumption: Representation of the Black Female Body as Food in Hip-Hop and R&B Songs Over the Past Twenty Years.”
August 18, 2020

The Journal of Creative Writing Studies special issue, “Creative Making as Creative Writing,” was a finalist for the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2020 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature. Launched in 2016 and published out of the RIT Publishing Studio, it is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that examines the teaching, practice, theory, and history of creative writing. Its editor-in-chief is Trent Hergenrader, associate professor in the Department of English.
August 11, 2020

Stephanie Godleski, assistant professor of psychology, and Ammina Kothari, associate professor in the School of Communication, presented their research on adolescents’ and young adults’ use of social media for mental health support during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Social BRIDGES e-conference on society, psychology, and behavior during and post COVID-19 lockdown. The conference is organized by the Institute of Psychology at the Bundeswehr University Munich.
August 11, 2020

Ammina Kothari, associate professor of communication, has been selected by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication as one of the Institute for Diverse Leadership fellows. The goal of this program is to provide a year-long administrative training for people of color and women.
August 11, 2020

Preethi Vaidyanathan ’10 MS (electrical engineering), ’18 Ph.D. (imaging science), a research scientist at EyeGaze Inc., published the article “Computational framework for fusing eye movements and spoken narratives for image annotation” in the Journal of Vision with co-authors Cissi Ovesdotter Alm, associate professor in the Department of English; Jeff Pelz, Endowed Professorship in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science; and Emily Prud'hommeaux, assistant professor at Boston College.

July 2020

July 28, 2020

Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor of science, technology, and society, was selected for the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network international workshops on green infrastructure. The symposia bring scholars, activists, community organizers, and other practitioners to build urban resilience through exploration of equitable and multifunctional green infrastructure implementation for the new climate normal.
July 23, 2020

A paper on the effects of eye-contact in remote communication derived from a master’s thesis introduction is being cited in guides for workplace meetings and online teaching. The paper authors are Leanne Bohannon ’07 (psychology), ’10 (experimental psychology); Andrew Herbert, a professor in the Department of Psychology; Jeff Pelz, the Endowed Professorship in RIT’s Center for Imaging Science; and Esa Rantanen, associate professor in the Department of Psychology.
July 14, 2020

Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society, has been named a mentor for the 2019-2020 academic year for the Ecological Society of America in conjunction with the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis Project, an open education community supported by the National Science Foundation intended to increase the effectiveness of undergraduate STEM education.
July 5, 2020

Cecilia O. Alm, associate professor of English, was Diversity and Inclusion co-chair with Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, research scientist at Google, for ACL 2020, the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, which took place virtually July 5-10. ACL is the world’s leading venue for computational research on natural language.