Swarthmore College Promotes Three Women to Full Professor

Swarthmore College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in suburban Philadelphia, has announced that five faculty members have been promoted to full professor. Three of the new full professors are women.

Amanda Bayer was named professor of economics. She is the creator and editor of Diversifying Economic Quality, an online resource sponsored by the American Economic Association. Professor Bayer’s recent research includes econometric analyses of mentoring programs for at-risk youth, development of alternative measures of the poverty rate, and a game theoretic examination of the relationship between unionization and CEO salaries. Professor Bayer has taught at Swarthmore College since 1992. She is a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and holds two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University.

Tia Newhall was promoted to professor of computer science at Swarthmore. She conducts research in parallel and distributed systems with a focus on providing system-level support for cluster computing. Professor Newhall holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, all from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Sunka Simon was appointed a full professor of German studies and film and media studies. Her research focuses on media-specific intersections of gender, race, and place in postwar German popular culture. She is the author of  Mail-Orders: The Fiction of Letters in Postmodern Culture (State University of New York Press, 2002). Dr. Simon earned a master’s degree in German and American literature from the University of Hamburg and a Ph.D. in German and literary theory from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.