Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Tamar Gordon focuses on the cultural analysis of contemporary religions and their intersections with local and global modernities; themed environments; discourse analysis, documentary theory, and has done fieldwork in Polynesian and American societies. She wrote, directed and co-produced the documentary feature film, "Global Villages" which was shown in film festivals around the world.

Skye Anicca is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media with specializations in creative writing, professional writing, and multiethnic literature of the United States. Her research and writing are highly interdisciplinary, drawing on scholarship in contemporary creative writing, border, communication, and intersectional gender studies, as well as critical analyses of U.S. pop culture and media. Her fiction has earned national recognition, including a Dana Award in short fiction and a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

Sara Tack is a creative director, art director, designer, artist and educator. She co-founded Smith & Jones, a marketing communications agency, where she designed and implemented integrated brand identity systems.

In her current art work and multimedia research, Patricia Search designs multimedia installations that explore the aesthetics of space, time, and action in computer interface design. “I work with digital media and create interactive installations that highlight ways to use diverse media, exploration, physical interaction, and social discourse to create immersive experiences for online communication,” Search said. “These multisensory environments create perceptual dichotomies that juxtapose realism and fantasy, logic and emotion, continuity and transition.

Nicholas Mizer's research sits at the intersection of anthropology, interactive design, phenomenology, and gonzo ethnography. From this position, Mizer investigates questions of how collaborative imagination shapes the human experience of worlds, especially how imagining other worlds together can serve as a way to re-enchant and re-make our own world.

Maurice Suckling has worked in the games industry for nearly 30 years, with over 50 published video game titles to his name. He’s worked as a producer, designer, voice director, motion capture director, animation director, and, most often, as a writer. In addition to Suckling’s work in games, he has also worked in TV and movies, and has published a collection of short stories. His research interests include storytelling in games, board and card games as narrative systems, and historical simulations. Suckling’s first game was Driver in 1999.

Jianling Yue is a lecturer and Chinese Minor Advisor in the Department of Communication and Media. Yue’s teaching and academic pursuits have earned her numerous awards and commendations from both colleagues and students.

Yalun Helen Zhou has an interdisciplinary background in applied linguistics, curriculum design, and program evaluation. Her work involves second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, multimodal literacy design with emerging technology, and user experience research on virtual platforms (e.g., gamified, game-based, and cognitive immersive). Before joining RPI, Zhou worked at Michigan State University, collaborating with Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute to offer an online Chinese program through massively multiple-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs).

Christopher Jeansonne is a Senior Lecturer in the Communication and Media Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research focuses on critical media pedagogy and gameful learning, investigating strategies designed to help students explore how identities are established within and articulated through popular culture media. His dissertation Superheroes in the Classroom, Or: An Autoethnography of Great Power, Responsibility, and Community in a Critical Media Pedagogy was the recipient of the 2019 Manuel Barkan Dissertation Award.

Anita Greenfield received her doctorate in the field of linguistics with a focus on sociolinguistics and second language acquisition and teacher education. Anita's doctoral research focused on English teacher identity and agency in the spread language ideology. She currently teaches ESL writing and oral communication/pronunciation and is interested in the application of the concept of intelligibility in second language pronunciation teaching.