At the December meeting of the Board of Managers, three faculty members were appointed to endowed chairs: Tim Burke (History) to the Peggy Chan Professorship, Aimee Johnson (Mathematics & Statistics) to the John Watts Roberts '39 and Jane Martin Roberts '39 Professorship, and Jon Kochavi (Music) to the Jane Lang Professorship.

Tim Burke

The Peggy Chan Professorship was established by Winston Zee P’07 in 2019.  It is awarded to a faculty member in Black Studies whose work fosters innovation and interdisciplinarity.

Professor of History Tim Burke is an outstanding scholar, leading thinker on the value of liberal arts, and model College citizen who serves the Swarthmore community with generosity and wisdom.

An expert in African history, he has been an active and valuable contributor to Black Studies during the entirety of his 31 years at the College. His courses in African history are a crucial part of the Black Studies curriculum, and he has served as coordinator of the program on multiple occasions. 

Burke is an active and dynamic scholar in the fields of African history, African studies, histories of consumption, and game studies. He is currently at work on a significant book for both African studies and the discipline of history, entitled Free Agency: Personhood, Action and Life in Modern African Society, and in 2024 he published an important peer-reviewed essay about the concept of “agency” for Black colonial and postcolonial Africans in the prestigious Journal of Social History. 

Burke is also a leading thinker and writer about the liberal arts and higher education. He has maintained a blog and Substack for over 20 years where he writes about academia and the labor and politics of higher education. 

Burke's contributions in service to the College have been superlative. He has served as co-director of the Aydelotte Foundation, and has played a leading role at the College in strategic planning, senior administrative searches, and countless ad hoc committees and task forces. In addition, he served for seven years as the History Department chair and one year as the division chair in the social sciences.

Aimee Johnson

The John Watts Roberts '39 and Jane Martin Roberts '39 Professorship was established by John Watts Roberts '39 and is awarded to a faculty member whose teaching and scholarship foster innovation and interdisciplinarity between engineering and non-engineering disciplines.

Johnson is a Professor of Mathematics whose research focuses on dynamical systems, a field that examines how complex systems evolve over time. Dynamical systems play a central role in modeling phenomena across disciplines, including engineering, information systems, physics, and biomedical research. Her scholarship spans both statistical and symbolic approaches, contributing rigorous mathematical foundations that help scientists and engineers design algorithms, interpret physical behavior, and address real-world problems.

In addition to her scholarly work, Johnson has an extensive record of service to the College. She currently serves as Honors Coordinator and as a member of the Swarthmore Forward Curriculum Review Committee, and she has been the faculty liaison for the women’s soccer team for more than a decade. Her leadership has included chairing both the Mathematics & Statistics Department and the Division of the Natural Sciences and Engineering. She has also made sustained contributions to College governance through repeated service on key committees, including Council on Educational Policy (CEP) and Committee on Faculty Procedures (CoFP).

Jon Kochavi

The Jane Lang Professorship in Music was established by Eugene M. Lang '38, H'81, to honor his daughter, Jane Lang '67. The Jane Lang Professorship is awarded to a member of the faculty whose teaching or professional activity promotes the centrality of music in the educational process by linking it to other disciplines.

Kochavi is a Professor of Music and a distinguished scholar of music theory. His research spans several interlocking areas, including diatonic theory and transformational theory, while also exploring the rich intersections of mathematics and music and disability studies in music. Together, this work reflects a deeply interdisciplinary approach that expands both the intellectual and human dimensions of the field.

Kochavi's teaching is closely integrated with his scholarship. In his article "Musica Speculativa for the Twenty-First Century,” he proposed a model for uniting mathematics and music within a liberal arts curriculum—a vision he brings to life through the extremely popular and frequently lotteried course Music 9A, "Music and Mathematics." Similarly, his article "How Do You Hear That? Autism, Blindness, and Teaching Music Theory," which examines how disability shapes musical experience and how theory instruction can be made more inclusive, directly informed the creation of Music 8D, “(Dis)ability: Perceptions and Music,” developed with Donna Jo Napoli and first offered in 2024.

Beyond the classroom, Kochavi is an active contributor to musical life on and off campus. He has served as program annotator for major ensembles including the Marin Symphony, the Sun Valley Music Festival, and the Edgar Bronfman Chamber Series. At Swarthmore, he performs with Gamelan Semara Santi and has sung with both the College Chorus and the Chester Children’s Chorus.

In 2020, he was an inaugural recipient of the Swarthmore Intercultural Center's Napoli-Kochavi Disability Advocacy Award, named in honor of his and Napoli's work on raising awareness and visibility of disability identity on campus.

Kochavi has also made significant contributions through service and leadership. He has served as Chair of the Music Department, been elected to the CoFP, and was a member of the 2022–23 Provost Search Committee, along with sustained service on numerous other College committees.