Liberal Arts Experiences

Carolyn Sachs is the recipient of the 2026 Honorary Alumnx Award from the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Sachs is professor emerita of rural sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State. She received her master of arts and doctor of philosophy degrees in sociology from the University of Kentucky. She is the author of numerous books on women, gender, agriculture, and the environment, including Invisible Farmers: Women in Agricultural Production; Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment; Women in Sustainable Agriculture; and The Gender and Agriculture Handbook.

Johnson recently published the book Mixing: Race, Higher Education, and the Case of Clyde Kennard,” with several co-authors. The book examines the life and death of Kennard, a Korean War veteran whose attempts to enroll at Hattiesburg’s then all-white Mississippi Southern College — now the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) — in the 1950s were met with the institutional racism of the late Jim Crow era.

Two scholars from war-torn Ukraine have found a welcoming temporary home at Penn State, thanks to the Fulbright Scholar Program. Mariia Grytsenko and Oleksandr Gon, both faculty members at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, were selected by Fulbright to spend the 2025-26 academic year housed in the College of the Liberal Arts’ Department of German and Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Cameron and Wagner, collaborated with other scholars on an article assessing how empathy for and from robots is considered from an interdisciplinary perspective. They published their work in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

In 2022, Brandt and Purdy brought together scholars to Penn State for a College of the Liberal Arts-funded conference focused on the historical connections between “scientific” racial theory in late-Enlightenment Germany and the malign effects of colonialism and Nazism more than a century later. The conversations that occurred at this conference resulted in the newly published book, “Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacy of German Race Theories,” which features 11 essays examining the many ways theories about race posited by 18th century philosophers like Immanuel Kant influenced later forms of racism in the 19th and 20th centuries and even today.

Celeste Kinginger recently received the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize for her book, “The Professional Lives of Language Study Abroad Alumni: A Mixed Methods Investigation” (Multilingual Matters), which she co-wrote with Jingyuan Zhuang, who received her doctoral degree in applied linguistics from Penn State.