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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February 2025

February 19, 2025

Priti Kalsi, associate professor of economics, co-authored “The Gilded Age and Beyond: The Persistence of Elite Wealth in American History,” which was recently highlighted on NPR’s Planet Money as one of “5 economic papers that lit up our brains.” The study finds that while the wealthiest individuals tend to drop in rankings over time, having a wealthy grandparent significantly increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1 percent.
February 12, 2025

Silvia Benso, professor of philosophy and director of the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies program, presented “The (Im)potentiality of Embodied Geographies in Lea Melandri’s Love and Violence” at the Women and Italian Contemporary Theory speaker series on Feb. 7 at the University of Toronto. Her talk explored Melandri’s feminist activism as a practice of love and resistance against institutionalized violence.
February 12, 2025

Signatures, RIT’s student-run art and literary magazine, has been recognized as a REALM First Class magazine, the highest distinction awarded by the National Council of Teachers of English. This year, 422 student magazines from 46 states and five countries were nominated. The Signatures editorial team includes students from various disciplines across campus.
February 7, 2025

Caroline DeLong, professor of psychology, and Logan Brownell ’24 (psychology), published “Hand Preferences in Olive Baboons During Cognitive Performance on Match-to-Sample Tasks and Natural Behaviors” in the American Journal of Primatology in January. Portions of this work were done as Brownell’s senior project in psychology and involved research assistants in the Comparative Cognition and Perception Lab.
February 6, 2025

Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, was part of a global collaboration, Many Eco Evo Analysts, which conducted an experiment where more than 200 researchers made their own decisions about how to analyze a dataset. Their findings about reproducibility in ecology and biology, “Same data, different analysts: variation in effect sizes due to analytical decisions in ecology and evolutionary biology,” were published in BMC Biology. The study was also showcased in Nature.
February 6, 2025

Lauren Hall, associate dean, College of Liberal Arts, published “Structural Hobbling: Regressive Harm, Diffuse Responsibility, and Structural Injustice” in Social Philosophy and Policy. The research was previously presented at meetings of the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society and the American Political Science Association.
February 5, 2025

Kristoffer Whitney, associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, was awarded a $34,452 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation books program to complete a manuscript on the biomedical use of horseshoe crabs. Whitney’s research has highlighted a potential shift, prompted by regulatory changes, toward the use of animal-free alternatives for endotoxin testing in the pharmaceutical industry.

January 2025

January 20, 2025

Rebecca DeRoo, professor in the School of Communication, presented Cleo from 5 to 7 by Agnes Varda during the Little Theatre's 95th anniversary celebration.
January 10, 2025

Katrina Overby, assistant professor in the School of Communication, appeared in Black in America, a film by Our Voices Project that won an award at the 2024 Voices Rising Film Festival. The documentary was shown at The Little Theatre as part of the One Take Doc Series in December. Overby also discussed the film on the Representation in Cinema podcast, produced by Our Voices Project.
January 10, 2025

LeeAnne Valentine, adjunct faculty in the College of Liberal Arts, authored an article titled “Representation Matters for BIPOC in Mental Health,” in the American Deafness and Rehabilitation Association’s newsletter, ADARA Update. The article emphasizes the importance of culturally similar therapists and psychologists in supporting the mental health wellness of BIPOC individuals.