Faculty Experts
These members of the faculty and other members of the community are knowledgeable in various disciplines and can provide expert commentary on a wide range of issues in the news. Please contact the Communications Office if you would like to reach them.
Higher Education
- Valerie Smith, president
- Sarah Willie-LeBreton, provost
- Jim Bock '90, vice president and dean of admissions
Art and Art History
- Tomoko Sakomura: Japanese art history; Japanese visual culture, contemporary and late medieval; East Asian art
Astronomy
- David Cohen: x-ray spectroscopy; radiation-driven stellar winds; stellar x-ray emission
- Eric Jensen: planet formation; astrobiology or origin and distribution of life in the cosmos; protoplanetary disks
Biology
- Jose-Luis Machado: biodiversity; ecosystems; plant physiological ecology; metabolic ecology
- Amy Cheng Vollmer: bacterial stress response, particularly in prokaryotes such as E. coli; microbiology; immune response; biotechnology
Black Studies
- Nina Johnson: sociology: race, class, inequality, urban sociology, cultural sociology, neighborhoods, spatial inequality, prisons, urban public policy, and black studies
- Valerie Smith, president: African-American literature
Chemistry
- Kathleen Howard: biophysical chemistry; magnetic resonance spectroscopy; membrane protein structure determination
- Robert Paley: modern organic synthetic chemistry; organic chemistry
Cognitive Science
- Lisa Meeden: adaptive robotics; developmental robotics; artificial intelligence
Computer Science
- Lisa Meeden: adaptive robotics; developmental robotics; artificial intelligence
- Richard Wicentowski: natural language processing
Dance
- Kim Arrow, dance: Taiko drumming; Afro/Caribbean drumming and East Indian rhythmic theory
- Pallabi Chakravorty: South Asian dance
Economics
- Amanda Bayer: microeconomics, game theory, labor markets, diversity
- Syon Bhanot: behavioral economics, public policy, experimental economics, decision-making, and public economics
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Erin Todd Bronchetti: public finance, labor economics, health economics
- John Caskey: fringe banking such as pawn shops and check-cashing outlets
- Stephen Golub: international trade and finance
- Mark Kuperberg: macroeconomics, public finance, law and economics
- Ellen Magenheim: health care; industrial organization; antitrust issues
- Stephen O'Connell: political economy of Africa, macroeconomic policy in low-income developing countries, monetary policy management of surges in foreign aid
- Jennifer Peck: labor economics, development economics, and energy and environmental economics
- Marc Remer: antitrust, mergers, collusion, industrial organization, and the retail gasoline industry
Educational Studies
- Edwin Mayorga: education policy, U.S. Latinx education, urban politics and social movements, and social justice education
- Joseph Derrick Nelson: boys' education, identity development, participatory action research, single-sex education, qualitative research methods, urban school reform
- Lisa Smulyan '76: gender and education, adolescence
Engineering
- Erik Cheever '82: electronic circuit applications
- Carr Everbach: wind power; green design; human nature and technology; thermofluid mechanics; physical effects of ultrasound
- Lynne Molter '79: fiber optics; waveguide devices; electromagnetics; scientific literacy in the liberal arts
- Faruq Siddiqui: structural theory and design; geotechnical design; mechanics of solids
English Literature
- Nathalie Anderson: modern and contemporary poetry; libretti; creative writing
- Anthony Foy: African American literature; literature of black Philadelphia
- Bakirathi Mani: Asian American culture and literature; South Asian diasporas; transnational feminist studies
- Peter Schmidt: American literature; fiction in the U.S. South during Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras; race, ethnicity, and literature in the U.S.
- Valerie Smith, president: African-American literature
- Patricia White: representation of women in film and visual media
Environmental Studies
- Carr Everbach, engineering: wind power; green design; human nature and technology
- Jose-Luis Machado, biology: biodiversity; ecosystems; Crum Woods
- Mark Wallace, religion: Christian theology and environmental studies
Film & Media Studies
- William Gardner, Japanese: Japanese film and media; the intersection of contemporary literature with visual and electronic media
- Sunka Simon, German: cyberculture; German and European cinema
- Bob Rehak: special effects, fictional worlds, transmedia franchises
- Patricia White, English literature: representation of women in film and visual media
- Carina Yervasi, French: French and Francophone African film
History
- Diego Armus: Latin American history; history of disease and public health in urban settings
- Timothy Burke: modern African history, specifically southern Africa, popular culture, including advertising, cartoons, and video games
- Allison Dorsey: Southern and African American history, slavery, Reconstruction, women in civil rights movement, food
- Bruce Dorsey: early American history, gender and sexuality, masculinity, American culture
- Robert Weinberg: Russian history since the 18th century; history and experiences of Jews in Soviet Union and Russia
Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
- Farha Ghannam, anthropology: contemporary Islamic practices and identities; gender and sexuality in the Middle East
Latin American Studies
- Diego Armus, history: Latin American history, history of disease and public health in urban settings, particularly Buenos Aires
- Edwin Mayorga, educational studies: education policy, U.S. Latinx education, urban politics and social movements, and social justice education
Linguistics
- K. David Harrison: endangered languages; connections between language and biodiversity, ethnoecology; Turkic languages of Inner Asia
- Donna Jo Napoli: language use, including slang and catch phrases
Mathematics and Statistics
- Phil Everson: statistics; sports editor of Chance magazine (an American Statistical Association publication) and writes the column, "A statistician reads the sports pages"
- Steve Wang: statistical techniques in paleontology and evolutionary biology; mass extinctions
Modern Languages and Literatures
- Sunka Simon, German: cyberculture; German and European cinema
- Hansjakob Werlen, German: Goethe; German Romanticism; Slow Food Movement; cultural history of food
- Carina Yervasi, French: French and Francophone African film
Music
- Gerald Levinson: award-winning composer whose works have been performed throughout the U.S. and Europe
- Thomas Whitman '82: Balinese Gamelan; composition; opera
Peace and Conflict Studies
- Wendy Chmielewski: curator, Swarthmore College Peace Collection
- Lee Smithey, sociology: nonviolent social movements; ethnopolitical conflict; Northern Ireland
- Sa'ed Atshan, contemporary Palestinian society and politics; global LGBTQ social movements; Quaker Studies and Christian minorities in the Middle East.
Philosophy
- Krista Thomason: moral emotions, shame and shaming, Immanuel Kant, genocide, and child soldiers
Physics
- Michael Brown: solar physics; nuclear fusion energy
- Amy Graves: simulations of soft condensed matter systems, gender and science, and computational physics education
Political Science
- Benjamin Berger: modern political theory; democratic politics; ethics in politics; civic engagement
- Carol Nackenoff: electoral politics; political rhetoric
- Keith Reeves '88: the impact of race on electoral politics and public affairs
- Dominic Tierney: international politics; U.S. foreign policy; public opinion and war; security issues
- Richard Valelly '75: electoral law and the 1965 Voting Rights Act; the party system; Congress
- Tyrene White: Chinese and East Asian politics; disaster politics and policy; population politics and global demographics
Psychology
- Frank Durgin: perception and cognition
- Andrew Ward: self-regulation and control, including strategies for control of eating, smoking, aggression, depressed mood, and obsessive thoughts; psychological barriers to conflict resolution; bargaining and negotiation
Religion
- Yvonne Chireau: African-based religions such as Santeria and Voodoo in America; religion and healing; black American religion; religion and comics, manga, and graphic novels
- Steven Hopkins: Hinduism and Buddhism in South Asia; South Indian devotional literature in Sanskrit and Tamil; religion and literature
- Mark Wallace: religion and ecology
Sociology and Anthropology
- Farha Ghannam, anthropology: contemporary Islamic practices and identities; gender and sexuality in the Middle East; urban ethnography
- Nina Johnson, sociology: race, class, inequality, urban sociology, cultural sociology, neighborhoods, spatial inequality, prisons, urban public policy, and black studies
- Braulio Muñoz, sociology: sociology of culture, Latin America, author of Peruvian Notebooks
- Sarah Willie-LeBreton, sociology: African-American culture, politics, and literature
Theater
- Allen Kuharski: Polish theater, drama