At the February meeting of the Board of Managers, 11 faculty members were approved for promotion. 

Seven faculty members received tenure and promotion to associate professor:

Elaine Allard ’01

Educational studies scholar Elaine Allard ’01’s research and teaching interests include multilingualism and multilingual education, secondary language and minority education in the U.S., sociolinguistics, and adolescent literacy. Her ethnographic work focuses on the education of immigrants and language minorities, with a particular emphasis on Latino immigrants in secondary schools. Allard’s collaborative research on schooling for Mexican-origin youth in a New Latino Diaspora town has appeared in journals such as Anthropology & Education Quarterly, the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, and the International Multilingual Research Journal.

Joshua Brody

Computer scientist Joshua Brody’s area of research is theoretical computer science, seeking to understand which problems may be computed efficiently and which require a large amount of resources to solve. Brody, a leading expert in the field of communication complexity, is also interested in how communication lower bounds provide lower bounds in other areas such as streaming algorithms, property testing, and data structures. He serves as a coach for the Computer Science Department’s intercollegiate programing team.

Lei Ouyang Bryant

Ethnomusicologist Lei Ouyang Bryant’s primary scholarly interests include music, culture, and performance in East Asia, primarily China, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Asian America. Her research examines issues of music and memory, identity, politics, race and ethnicity, popular culture, and social justice. She is the author of the forthcoming book Music as Mao’s Weapon: Songs and Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, an in-depth and original ethnographic research on the impact of propaganda songs exploring the intricate relationships among memory, nostalgia, and trauma.

BuYun Chen

Historian BuYun Chen specializes in the history of textile production, fashion, and craft technology in premodern China. She recently completed a book on the history of fashion during the Tang dynasty, titled Empire of Style: Silk and Fashion in Tang China. Her current research explores how the circulation of raw materials, finished goods, and technical knowledge among China, Japan, and Southeast Asia shaped local craft practices.  

Chris Graves

Chemist Chris Graves researches the development of novel aluminum complexes for application as catalysts, with specific interest in the synthesis of aluminum complexes of redox active ligands across various oxidation states. Recently, Graves was one of only eight recipients of the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, which honors young faculty in the chemical sciences who are accomplished researchers and committed educators.

Daifeng He

Economist Daifeng He’s research areas are health economics and policy, the economics of Medicare and Medicaid policies, long-term care, and insurance. She is the author of 15 journal publications, has been asked to give 12 invited talks, and has won four major grants from the likes of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Edwin Mayorga

Educational studies scholar Edwin Mayorga identifies as a parent-educator-scholar-activist, and his work focuses on examining the intersections of education policy, urban development, critical pedagogy, and Latinx communities. He works through a critical participatory action research framework that he applies to varying degrees in a number of projects, including the Education in our Barrios Project; the Community, Schools, and College Partnership study; and the Ethnic Studies Philadelphia project. He works with his students to manage CritEdPol, an undergraduate online journal of critical education policy studies. 

Four faculty members were promoted from associate to full professor:

Linda Chen

Mathematician Linda Chen is a scholar of algebraic geometry and algebraic combinatorics. She was the principal investigator (P.I.) on three individual National Science Foundation (NSF) grants from 2004 to 2017 and is now the P.I. for a Simons Foundation Grant through 2022. From 2011 to 2013, while on leave from Swarthmore, she served as a program director for the Topology and Geometric Analysis section of the NSF. In addition, she serves as associate editor for the American Mathematical Monthly.

Bakirathi Mani

English literature scholar Bakirathi Mani is a specialist in Asian American cultural studies with particular emphasis on South Asian diasporas. She also teaches courses on transnational feminist studies, postcolonial theory, and literatures of globalization. Mani is also the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America, which focuses on immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh and examines how their ethnicity is produced through the relationship between domestic racial formations and global movements of class and capital.

Tomoko Sakomura

Art historian and Assistant Vice President and Dean of Academic Success Tomoko Sakomura is a specialist in Japanese art history whose work examines the relationship between word and image in the visual culture of late medieval Japan. She offers courses on East Asian art that explore major traditions in painting, calligraphy, sculpture, and architecture, as well as courses on Japanese art of the past and the present, including the tea ceremony and contemporary visual culture.

Dominic Tierney

Political scientist Dominic Tierney, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a contributing editor at The Atlantic, is an expert in international politics with particular interest in U.S. foreign policy, public opinion and war, and broader international security issues. He has written four books: Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics, FDR and the Spanish Civil War: Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle that Divided America, How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War, and The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts.