Judd Ruggill currently serves as Associate Dean of Academic Services for the Graduate College, Professor of Public & Applied Humanities, and affiliate faculty member in the American Literary Translators Association, the Arizona Astrobiology Center (Office of Research and Partnerships), the College of Information Science, the Department of Africana Studies (College of Humanities), the Department of English (College of Social & Behavioral Sciences), the Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Social, Cultural & Critical Theory (Graduate College), the LGBTQ+ Institute (Office of Research & Partnerships), and the School of Theatre, Film & Television (College of Fine Arts) . He joined the University of Arizona in 2016 as part of the Computational Media Cluster initiative, led the creation of the Center for Digital Humanities, and from 2017-2025 served as the founding Head of the Department of Public & Applied Humanities. From 2008-2016, he was a faculty member in the School of Social & 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 New College of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication. He holds a PhD and MA in Comparative Cultural & Literary Studies from the University of Arizona (2005/2000), a BA in English/American Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz (1994), and he and colleague Ken McAllister co-direct the Learning Games Initiative, a transdisciplinary, inter-institutional research group they 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 Ken McAllister about archiving. In his spare time he plays the double bass.
Samples of his scholarship may be found here.