At the December meeting of the Board of Managers, the following faculty members were appointed or re-appointed to endowed chairs: Betsy Bolton (English literature), Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English; Carr Everbach (engineering), Isaiah V. Williamson Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering; Brad Koch (physical education, athletics, and recreation), Marian Snyder Ware Professor of Physical Education and Athletics; Tia Newhall (computer science), Centennial Chair of Computer Science; K. Ann Renninger (educational studies), Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action; Mark Wallace (religion), James Hormel Professor of Social Justice; and Patricia White (film and media studies), Centennial Chair Professor of Film and Media Studies. 

Betsy Bolton

Bolton is the author of Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and more than 20 chapters and essays. She is currently at work on two manuscripts: Revising Romanticism’s Inner Worlds, under consideration by Cambridge University Press, and Dancing with Demons: Seeking Environmental Wisdom, inspired by her experience as a Fulbright Scholar. Her Fulbright-supported work in both Morocco and Bhutan emphasized sharing with her host communities both the technology and the skills to undertake their own forms of digital storytelling. 

Over the past two decades, Bolton has worked to increase the presence of the humanities in the Environmental Studies Program. Her innovative courses include River Stories, which introduces students to the Delaware River and its ecosystem, and Changemakers, in which students focus on the College’s energy and waste systems.

Carr Everbach

Everbach has taught broadly in the Engineering Department, with courses from Electrical Circuit Analysis and Linear Physical Systems to Thermofluid Mechanics and Dynamics of Mechanical Systems. In the Environmental Studies Program, his courses have included Solar Energy Systems, Aerodynamics, Women & Technology, and Human Nature, Technology, and the Environment. Recently, Everbach has garnered two major grants: one from Lower Merion Township, Pa., to measure, with his students, ambient noise and to conduct analytical surveys, and another with colleagues in the University of Nebraska’s cardiology department to discover and treat acute coronary syndromes with sound. With one of his former Swarthmore students, he has patented an infant health-monitoring system, and since becoming a full professor, he has published 15 co-authored refereed papers, particularly on the topic of ultrasound, for better health outcomes.

Everbach is well-known for his service on and off campus (he has served on the local school board), and for his involvement as a nationally recognized expert on acoustics. A member of a dozen professional learned societies, he has chaired the Technical Committee of the Biomedical Ultrasound Association and been named a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. 

Brad Koch

Koch joined Swarthmore this past summer having arrived from Cabrini University, where he served as the director of athletics and recreation and his teams took home 58 conference championships and appeared in 41 NCAA Tournaments. Since beginning on July 26, he has welcomed back student athletes and their parents, club sports players, physical education participants, and alumni. Koch demonstrates a strong commitment to collaboration, community, communication, and competition. 

He is using his administrative team well, to strive for equity among teams in everything from assistant coaches to annual team travel. Having partnered with the provost and the vice president for finance and administration, Koch has prioritized the renovation and new construction of spaces in which students can play and learn with safety and dignity and where Swarthmore can host teams from other schools with pride. 

Tia Newhall

Newhall helped lead a curricular redesign of the computer science major and minor programs. Her co-authored textbook Dive into Systems forms a key component of the College’s introductory and intermediate course sequence. She has worked steadfastly to increase the numbers of women in computer science. Her general research area is parallel and distributed systems. One main project implements fast backing storage systems for cluster computers, and another implements a virtualization layer on top of a heterogeneous collection of cluster storage devices.

Since becoming a full professor, Newhall has won an Association for Computing Machinery Specialty Interest Group Computer Science Education Special Projects Award, a National Science Foundation award for her work on Fast Backing Store System on top of Network RAM, and a Computer Research Association award for Adding Reliability Support to a Network Swapping System for Linux Clusters. In addition, her nearly three dozen other publications are often co-authored with students and colleagues.

K. Ann Renninger

Renninger’s research focuses on motivation and interest in learning. She is the co-author or co-editor of four books and the co-author, often with Swarthmore students and faculty, of more than two dozen articles since becoming a full professor. One of her recent projects involves working with Swarthmore students and colleagues at Brown University on the Natural Science Foundation project Computer Science for All, a mixed-methods project studying how to help eighth- and ninth-grade teachers integrate computing into their mathematics teaching. Renninger’s ongoing evaluation of the Science for Kids program at Swarthmore has added to our larger understanding of STEM learning and teaching.

Mark Wallace

Wallace’s areas of scholarship include religion, philosophy, and environmental studies. His most recent book, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-enchantment of the World (Fordham University Press), won the prestigious 2019 Nautilus Gold Award for Best Book in the area of “Religion and Spirituality of Western Thought.” A commitment to environmental justice stands at the center of much of his work as a public intellectual. He has published four other single-authored books; one edited book, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, Imagination, an anthology of the religious thought of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur; one co-edited book; and more than 50 articles and book reviews.

Wallace has worked closely with the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, making community-engaged learning a key component in many of his classes, and partners with community colleagues in the Chester Semester Program. He is a board member of Chester Eastside Inc. and a co-founder and longtime member of the Chester Swarthmore Learning Institute.

Patricia White

White is the author of five field-defining books on cinema and women’s studies: Women’s Cinema/World Cinema (Duke University Press, 2015); Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999); The Film Experience with Timothy Corrigan, the sixth edition of which is forthcoming from Bedford St. Martin’s Press; co-editor with Corrigan and Meta Mazaj of Critical Visions in Film Theory (Bedford St. Martin’s, 2011); and Rebecca (Bloomsbury Press, 2021) for the British Film Institute Film Classics series. She edited and contributed to Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory by Teresa de Lauretis (Illinois University Press, 2007).  

White's essays on feminist and LGBTQ cinema have also been published in Camera Obscura, Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, GLQ, and Screen, as well as in many edited volumes and online. She serves on the board of Women Make Movies, for which she is former board chair, Film Quarterly, and is a member of the editorial collective of Camera Obscura.