Judd Ruggill

Biography

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 group he 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 scholarship may be found here.

Awards

• International Travel Award
• Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, Summer 2014
• Faculty Fellowship
• National Association of Television Program Executives, Fall 2009
• Summer Research Stipend
• Arizona State University, Summer 2009