Newsmakers

July 21, 2023

Juilee Decker, professor and program director of museum studies, and David Messinger, professor of imaging science, presented their paper “Under the Hood: Multispectral Imaging for Historical Artifacts” at the 51st annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation in May in Jacksonville, Fla. Their project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, offers an accessible, user-friendly system and software that can be used on small format historical documents, sheet, and leaf collections to recover obscured and illegible text on historical materials and to document current condition.

July 18, 2023

Kaitlin Stack Whitney, assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society, was selected to be an affiliate of the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) for the 2023-2024 academic year.

July 13, 2023

John Capps, professor of philosophy, and Camille Lea, a computer engineering and philosophy double major, had their book review, “Thinking Philosophically,” published in Metascience. They reviewed Julian Baggini’s recent book, How to Think Like a Philosopher (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

July 13, 2023

Amit Batabyal, the Arthur J. Gosnell Professor of Economics and interim head of the Department of Sustainability, and co-editor Peter Nijkamp, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, had their book, The Creative Class Revisited: New Analytical Advances, published by World Scientific Publishing.

June 27, 2023

Ben Willmott, director of operations for the School of Performing Arts, presented “Achieving Service Excellence Through the Performing Arts at a STEM-based University” during the Association for Service Excellence in Higher Education’s (ASEHE) annual conference on June 14 in Winter Park, Fla. Willmott recently completed a Master of Science in service leadership and innovation through Saunders College of Business, which culminated in a qualitative research study examining student experiences in RIT’s Performing Arts Scholarship Program.

June 13, 2023

Jonathan Schroeder, the William A. Kern Professor in Communications, presented on his forthcoming book (co-authored with Janet Borgerson), Designed for Success: Better Living and Self-improvement with Midcentury Instructional Records, for the Popular Music Books in Process Series, sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, on June 12. The book, which is being published by MIT Press, traces the largely untold history of instructional records, which have been part of the recording industry from its inception.

June 8, 2023

Esa Rantanen, associate professor of psychology, served as the chair of the 22nd International Symposium on Aviation Psychology, held May 31-June 3 at RIT. The symposium had about 140 participants from 14 countries, from as far as Australia, Japan, and Singapore, as well as representation from the U.S. government.

May 25, 2023

Bruce A. Austin, professor in the School of Communication, reported and wrote “Quest for the Chest: Madeline Yale Wynne's Masterpiece,” the cover story for the June 2023 issue of Maine Antique Digest. The story is about a curator’s inadvertent encounter with a photograph of a 1903 bride’s chest that prompted a two-decade long search to bring the chest home. The hunt led to a fundraising campaign for the chest’s acquisition and resulted in its repatriation to the place where it was crafted.

May 25, 2023

Christine Keiner, chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, is one of 25 national college-level educators who has been selected to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded summer seminar on “Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Rust Belt.” The two-week seminar aims to help participants “equip their students to shape the future of the Rust Belt, identify and contribute to social solutions, and reimagine the role of the humanities within this sphere.” Keiner plans to enhance her syllabus for her environmental studies course on the Great Lakes, and to continue researching historical and contemporary Rust Belt bioinvasions.

May 18, 2023

Bruce A. Austin, professor in the School of Communication, authored Tourists and Trade: Roadside Craftsmen and the Highway Transforming Craft, published by SUNY Press. The book examines two small Western New York craft shops located on Routes 5 and 20, initiated at the height of the Depression, and their role elevating handcrafts from pantry shelves to museum vitrines and craftworkers from hobbyists to artist-professionals by innovating a business model adopted 70 years later on a very different “super highway” — the Internet.