Member of the Graduate Faculty | Professor, School of Theatre/Film and Television | Department Head, Public / Applied Humanities | Professor, Public / Applied Humanities
Judd Ruggill is Professor and founding Head of the Department of Public and Applied Humanities. He joined the University of Arizona in 2016 as part of the Computational Media Cluster initiative. From 2008-2016, he was a faculty member in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University and a member of the graduate faculty of the Department of English, the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. He holds a PhD in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies from the University of Arizona 2005) a BA in English/American Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz 1994) and he co-directs the Learning Games Initiative, a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research grouhe co-founded in 1999 to study, teach with, build, and archive computer games. Judd primarily researches play and the technologies, industries, and sociocultural phenomena that enable it. He has published and presented on topics ranging from xenolinguistics to the wicked problem of collaboration, and is currently working on a book with colleague Ken McAllister about archiving. In his spare time he plays the double bass. Samples of his scholarshimay be found here.