Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Dr. Nkuiya joined the Rensselaer faculty as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2023. He obtained his PhD in Economics  from the University of Montreal and worked for several institutions including University of California Santa Barbara and University of Alberta. His research specializes in understanding how natural resource users respond to changes in environmental and political conditions and mechanisms to promote conservation and recovery.

I joined the Department of STS as an Assistant Professor of Sociology of Public Health and Medicine. I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose research is situated at the intersections of Public/Global Health, Medical Sociology/Anthropology, Social Epidemiology, and Queer Health Activism. In addition to master’s degrees in Gender Studies and Sociology, I hold a PhD in Feminist Studies & Anthropology. My current book project looks at the socio-epidemiological dimensions of the highly politicized HIV epidemic in Turkey where public health has become a pathogenic technology.

After receiving a PhD in philosophy from the City University of New York, I spent several years in industry working on the Cyc artificial intelligence project before moving to the data firm Dun & Bradstreet as their principal ontologist. After postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, the University of St.

Mitch R. Murray is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media. He specializes in contemporary literature, science fiction, multiethnic literatures of the United States and Canada, and comics studies. His teaching focuses on how the creative practices of reading and writing make us better interpreters and creators of our shared social reality.Murray’s recent publications include the collection William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture, co-edited with Mathias Nilges, for the University of Iowa Press’s New American Canon series.

Brandi Brace is a lecturer in the Arts Department and teaches in the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences Program. An interdisciplinary educator, Brandi has a Bachelor’s in English from Misericordia University (Dallas, PA), a Master’s degree in Internet and Game Studies from Tampere University (Tampere, Finland), and experience in game design through her work with Atlantic Divide Games.Brandi is interested in analyzing character design and the player experience of characters within digital games.

Adam Biggs is a historian of race, medicine, and civil rights. His research explores how early-twentieth century Black doctors used professional medicine to advocate for racial justice and examines how understandings of academic and professional merit are shaped by racial politics.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine in the U.S. Wolf-Meyer marries ethnographic research with patients, their families, and patient support networks, participant-observation of scientists, clinicians, and health care workers, and archival analysis of scientific monographs and public policies to show how thorny, contemporary problems have developed out of longstanding ideas about health and disease, disability and normalcy, and nature and civilization.

Phil Vanderhyden is a multi-disciplinary artist, with work that ranges across painting, sculpture, curation, writing, forensic art-making, animation and performance.Vanderhyden’s work across disciplines emerges from an interest in contrasting modes of attention.Originally trained as a painter, Vanderhyden’s early work evoked motifs from 20th-century color field painting and reimagined them with processes that expressed a gap in time and technology, creating works that felt familiar, yet meaningfully voided.A similar approach can be seen in his curatorial work.  In 2011, Vanderhyden began

Corinne Jones studies digital rhetoric, digital communication, technical and professional communication, and social media. Corinne is particularly interested in digital activism. Corinne has published twice in First Monday, twice in the Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC), as well as in Computers and Composition Online, Computers and Composition; Media, Culture, and Society; Information, Communication, and Society.