Judd Ruggill, founding Head of the Department of Public and Applied Humanities, has received the 2025 University of Arizona Distinguished Head/Director’s Award.
“You have distinguished yourself not only through your visionary administrative expertise, but also through the trust you cultivate, the collaborations you inspire, and the resources you steward with remarkable care and foresight,” wrote Interim Provost Ronald Marx. “Under your leadership, Public and Applied Humanities has flourished into one of the most vibrant, collaborative and intellectually dynamic units on our campus.
Founded in 2017, the Department of Public and Applied Humanities has grown from 8 students in its first year to 405 now, an increase of nearly 5,000 percent over seven years.
“The exponential growth of the department’s enrollment, the successful establishment of multi-college academic pathways, and the elevation of inclusive excellence as a guiding principle—all testify to your dedication, creativity, and strategic brilliance,” Marx wrote.
Notably, Ruggill was the only full-time faculty member in the department at its founding. The department now has 16 core faculty members and four adjunct instructors.
“There was no other model for such a unit in the country, we knew it would have to be radically collaborative and transdisciplinary. The fact that the unit has grown significantly every single year for the last seven years, however, is a compelling sign that a very skillful leader is at the helm,” wrote the College of Humanities four deans in a joint nomination letter. “Dr. Ruggill worked extremely hard as a Department Head to bring our new department to life, and he has succeeded so well that it is now a jewel in the crown of our college and a model of the future of the Humanities at the national level.”
In another joint nomination letter, the department’s senior faculty noted that under Ruggill’s leadership, Public and Applied Humanities has developed into one of the most collaborative units on campus.
“A practiced proponent of true shared governance, Dr. Ruggill assiduously supports the will of our departmental team, which includes staff and faculty of all ranks and classifications,” they wrote. “With his attention to detail and his trust in our team’s ability to build an effective department together, Dr. Ruggill uses a deft administrative touch that has helped our curriculum develop organically from our interests and strengths, as well as for the needs of our students.”
The B.A. in Applied Humanities provides students with a transdisciplinary education combining professional skills with the cognitive, creative, international, interpersonal, and intercultural intelligences and competencies taught in the humanities.
Students can select from 11 emphases, the result of strong partnerships with colleges across campus: Business Administration; Consumer, Market & Retail Studies; Engineering Approaches; Environmental Systems; Fashion Studies; Game Studies; Medicine; Plant Studies; Public Health; Rural Leadership & Renewal; and Spatial Organization & Design Thinking.
“Dr. Ruggill rarely lets institutional or structural challenges get in the way of a good collaboration,” the senior faculty wrote. “Dr. Ruggill’s spirited support of faculty, his clear guidance for collaboratively developing our courses, and his focus on fiscal responsibility and revenue growth made it possible for the faculty to assemble a robust, unique, and compelling degree built on a curricular structure both strong and flexible.”
Ruggill joined the U of A faculty in 2016 as part of the Computational Media Cluster initiative. He primarily researches play and the technologies, industries and sociocultural phenomena that enable it. He has published and presented on topics ranging from archiving to xenolinguistics, and in his spare time plays the double bass.
The Distinguished Head/Director’s Award was created in 2021, sponsored by the University of Arizona Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost. The award recognizes uncommon performance, calling attention to individuals whose leadership and management has raised the standards, expectations, and reputation of the unit as a whole, or who have otherwise brought excellence, innovation, and high ethical standards to the art of being a unit head or director. Karen Seat, Head of the Department of Religious Studies and Classics and Director of the School of International Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, was one of the inaugural recipients.