This spring, 12 faculty members were approved for tenure or promotion at the February Board of Managers meeting.

Faculty members receiving promotion to professor include:

Diane Anderson

Professor of Educational Studies Diane Anderson uses active experiences and ethnographic methods to explore the power of the social identities of readers, writers, and learners.

For example, Anderson teaches students in her Teaching Diverse Young Learners course how to knit as a way to foster pedagogical empathy as it requires them to struggle with learning.

Anderson previously served as the associate dean for Academic Affairs for eight years and is currently engaged with students in a study of Learning for Life, a voluntary mutual learning program at Swarthmore primarily comprised of student-staff partnerships, in which both partners are recognized for their teaching and learning capacities.

Ben Berger

Professor of Political Science Ben Berger is the executive director of the College's Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility. In this role, he has focused the Center's mission on connecting the curriculum with the community. 

Berger also studies the intersection between normative political theory and empirical political science. Current research projects include a book on civic education and another on moral engagement and disengagement, which spans the fields of political philosophy, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. He has also published work on Alexis de Tocqueville, Hannah Arendt, political participation, and civic education, and is a frequent guest on the nationally syndicated NPR program "Radio Times."

Lara Cohen

Professor of English Literature Lara Cohen teaches courses on early American literature, especially 19th-century African American literature, as well as literary theory, Marxism, and old media.

She is the author of Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023) and The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

Recent publications include essays on the literature of Mammoth Cave, music in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, mid-19th-century city mysteries, and summer jams. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Council of Learned Societies. 

Vince Formica

Professor of Biology Vince Formica uses a combination of selection analysis, social network analysis, animal behavior, and mutli-level selection theory to understand how the social environment can shape and be shaped by the process of natural selection.

He and his students study the forked fungus beetle (Bolitotherus cornutus) as a model system to understand how social behaviors evolve. Each summer, this "Beetle Crew" travels to Mountain Lake Biological Station in southern Virginia to conduct the field components of its research.

Formica is also involved in Science for Kids, a summer science education program organized by Swarthmore faculty and instructors for roughly 50 children from the Chester Children’s Chorus each year. 

Nsoki Mavinga

Professor of Mathematics Nsoki Mavinga's research focuses on nonlinear analysis and partial differential equations. She is particularly interested in the solvability of nonlinear second order parabolic and elliptic partial differential equations subject to nonlinear boundary conditions, and how these problems interrelate with physical and biological phenomena. 

Other interests include mathematical epidemiology, and developing and analyzing delay differential equations models for infectious diseases.

Faculty members receiving continuous tenure and promotion to associate professor include:

Carolyn Bauer

Associate Professor of Biology Carolyn Bauer studies the degu, a small rodent native to central Chile, in order to understand how early-life conditions shape health and physiology.

Her previous work has focused on the endocrine stress response in degus. Bauer is also interested in how environmental cues may adaptively affect the development of other physiological systems, especially water balance physiology and metabolism.

She also uses the degu to study the effects of parental separation and how certain circumstances, such as remaining with a known non-parent caregiver, can mitigate the negative effects of parental separation.

Cacey Bester

Associate Professor of Physics Cacey Bester studies experimental soft condensed matter, granular flow, and sediment transport to understand how disordered systems deform, flow, and fail.

In her SwatGrains Lab, Bester designs experiments alongside students and mentors them as they uncover the surprising physics hidden in the everyday. A recent experiment observed a pile of sand as small bursts of energy caused the grains to shift and flow. Using polarized light and special filters, Bester and her students tracked how grains press against one another in the critical moments when a solid transforms into liquid.

Paloma Checa-Gismero

Associate Professor of Art History Paloma Checa-Gismero is a historian of global contemporary art. Her teaching revisits the history of North Atlantic art and visual culture from a transnational lens that foregrounds culture's embeddedness in social and institutional life. Her scholarship addresses past and present relations of coloniality that support contemporary distinctions of culture as art. 

She has published widely about art biennials, craft, and socially engaged art and is the author of Biennial Boom: Making Contemporary Art Global (Duke University Press, 2024).

Catherine Hsu

Associate Professor of Mathematics Catherine Hsu studies algebraic number theory with a particular interest in congruences between modular forms as well as Euclidean ideals and systems.

Her research investigates the structure of certain arithmetic invariants arising in algebraic number theory and seeks to develop new algebraic techniques to explore classical questions about the reciprocity between Hecke algebras and Galois deformation rings conjectured in the Langlands program.

Roseann Liu

Associate Professor of Educational Studies and Asian American Studies Roseann Liu is a scholar of race, education inequality, and social justice. She has published about multiracial solidarity, structural racism in school funding, and engaged methodologies. Her book, Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024.

Liu is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, American Educational Research Association, and Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Allison Miller

Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics Allison Miller studies knots in 3-manifolds, surfaces in 4-manifolds, and the interactions between them in order to better understand 4-dimensional topology.

Miller teaches math classes at all levels of the curriculum, including Math 27: Linear Algebra and Math 67: Introduction to Modern Algebra. One of her pedagogical focuses is on ethics in mathematics and the connections of mathematics to social justice, which she brought to the curriculum in Math 20: Mathematics and Social Justice, a course taught in Spring 2022 and 2024.

Zach Palmer

Associate Professor of Computer Science Zach Palmer explores type theory and program analysis, and their application to software engineering. He primarily focuses on demand-driven approaches to higher-order program analysis. His research interests also include software engineering, compile-time metaprogramming, subtype constraint theory, and related program analyses.

Palmer teaches computer science classes at all levels of the curriculum, including CS35: Data Structures and Algorithms and CS75: Compilers.