At the recent meeting of the Board of Managers, the following faculty members were appointed to endowed chairs: Yvonne Chireau (religion), Peggy Chan Professor of Black Studies; Kathleen Howard (chemistry), Edward Hicks Magill Professor of Mathematics & Natural Sciences; Ellen Magenheim (economics), Centennial Chair and Professor of Economics; Barbara Milewski (music), Daniel Underhill Professor of Music; Lynne Molter (engineering), Henry C. and J. Archer Turner Professor of Engineering; Paul Rablen (chemistry), Edmund Allen Professor of Chemistry; and Tyrene White (political science), Richter Professor of Political Science.

Yvonne Chireau

Chireau is the author of Black Magic: African American Religion and the Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press) and the editor and contributor with Nathaniel Deutsch, of Black Zion: African American Religions and Judaism, (Oxford University Press), and nearly four dozen peer-reviewed journal articles, essays, book chapters and book reviews. She has served as chairperson of the Religion Department and served on the Black Studies Program Steering Committee along with service on more than a dozen college committees.

Chireau has also been active at the national level as a member of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History.

Kathleen Howard

Out of 30 papers Howard has published in the nation’s most highly regarded peer-reviewed journals, 13 are co-authored with Swarthmore students. She has supervised nearly 50 students in her research lab who have gone on to complete medical school and also Ph.D. programs at the country’s leading programs.

Howard has been consistently funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Merck during her time at Swarthmore, bringing in more than $2.3 million in grant funding. "Kathleen is an innovative and creative teacher, and an extraordinary mentor to students," observes former Provost Tom Stephenson.

Ellen Magenheim

Magenheim is the author of nearly two dozen peer-reviewed journal articles, reviews, book chapters and essays in the popular press. She has served as Economics Department Chair, Associate Provost, Acting Director of Academic Relations of the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and she coordinated the Program in Public Policy.

She has also served on a presidential search committee, the Faculty Compensation Committee, the Council on Educational Policy (CEP), and most recently she chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on the CEP Pool. Magenheim has also served as a visiting faculty member at Penn’s Wharton School of Business.

Barbara Milewski

Milewski has won a Fulbright, as well as awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Center for the Arts, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. She is the author of 20 articles, essays, or reviews including a 60-page compact disc guide to "Ballads and Broadsides: Songs from Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp".

Milewski is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled, Musical Mementos from the Nazi Concentration Camps. She is a prolific translator, having translated dozens of poems, films and songs from Polish and German into English. She has also been a dedicated campus citizen, serving on more than a dozen committees, chairing the Music and Dance Department, and participating robustly in her learned society professional organizations.

Lynne Molter

Molter is a recipient of the Newport Research Corporation Fellowship and the Optical Society of America Scholarship. Her experience includes working as a consultant at the U.S. Army for their Electronics Technology and Devices Laboratory in New Jersey and Maryland and as a Project Engineer for Hewlett Packard in California. Molter has served as Department, Natural Sciences and Engineering Division chair, and president of the College’s American Association of University Professors chapter. She has won $1.1 million in grants during her tenure, served on more than two dozen  committees, and has pioneered an outreach course, ENGR 010: Food Engineering, that regularly attracts large numbers of students interested in the intersection of science, technology and food preparation.

Paul Rablen

Over the course of his 27-year career at Swarthmore, Rablen has been invited to work in laboratories the world over -- from the Neurogen Corporation in Connecticut to the University of Washington in Seattle, and from Princeton University to the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He has won more than a quarter of a million dollars in grants from Henry Dreyfus, Mellon, DuPont, Cottrell, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the American Chemical Society and the National Science Foundation.

Rablen has served in such roles as Natural Science Division Chair, Chemistry Department Chair, Faculty Marshal, Faculty Secretary, and Faculty Parliamentarian. He is actively involved in chemistry’s learned societies and is author or co-author of more than five dozen articles in the nation’s most prestigious peer-reviewed journals, 17 of which are with Swarthmore students.

Tyrene White

White is the author of China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949-2005 (Cornell University Press). She is also the co-author and co-editor of three other volumes: China Briefing 2000: The Continuing Transformation; Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State; and Gender and China. She authored nearly two dozen other peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and reviews and is the recipient of a number of awards, including the National Academy of Sciences National Program for Advanced Study and Research in China.

White was the first female tenure line faculty member in political science, blazing a trail to make the department more welcoming. Serving the College on more than a dozen committees, she has been Faculty Parliamentarian, Faculty Board Observer, Coordinator of the Asian Studies Program, and Chair of the Department of Political Science.