Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Ralph Noble is an associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science.  His research has explored Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Endocrinology with a focus on the neuroendocrine control of sensory motor systems.  Currently, his interests include the psychology of games and modeling bureaucratic control systems.   

Omar Williams currently teaches at Shaker Junior High School in Latham, NY where he directs band, jazz ensemble, and teaches general music. He is also an adjunct trumpet professor at RPI since 2019. Williams holds a Master of Music Education and a Bachelor of Trumpet Performance and Music Education from Ithaca College.   An active freelancer, he has performed with many local ensembles including the Silver Arrow Band, New York Players, Schenectady Symphony, Glens Falls Symphony, and Sage City Orchestras.

Jarah Moesch is a multi-disciplinary designer artist-scholar whose work explores issues of justice through the design, production, and acquisition of embodied knowledges. Jarah’s research incorporates queer, crip theories, media & cultural studies, art, and design practices to develop new models for justice and to imagine new worlds. As a scholar, artist, designer, and multi-modal educator, Jarah’s research and pedagogy focuses on how knowledge is produced, distributed, acquired, and managed.

Ronald Ladouceur has a broad and varied academic and professional background. An adjunct lecturer at RPI in School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences since 2023, where he has taught courses in media studies and design, Ladouceur also serves as an adjunct professor in the School of Business at the University at Albany, where, since 2013, he has taught branding, marketing and entrepreneurship at both the graduate and undergraduate level. His recent academic work has focused on the intersection of branding, popular science, and culture in the U.S.

Rush’s career has lead him to several game studios such as Guerilla, Square Enix and Telltale. With a strong belief that games can be art, he wrote an essay for the “Art of Video Games” exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum on ambiguity’s role in the game “Limbo.” He has also worked in motion capture for film, concept art, board games, anime, and traditional media.He taught at Indiana University for many years before joining RPI. 

Audrey Peterson-McCann, Ph.D. specializes in British literature of the long-Nineteenth Century. She also has expertise in teaching college writing. Her dissertation, awarded with distinction, centers around the conceptualization of the child and the animal in the Victorian era and the ways that literary narratives both formed these conceptions and responded to them, playing both discursive and pedagogical functions in relation to subject formation.

Dr. William Gibbons joined RPI as Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and Professor in 2024.