Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota Selects Alison Byerly as Its Next President

The board of trustees of Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, has appointed Alison Byerly as the educational institution’s 12th president. She will take office on August 1.

“It is a tremendous honor and privilege to be chosen as Carleton’s next president,” Dr. Byerly said. “The great respect and admiration I have always felt for Carleton as one of the country’s finest liberal arts colleges has been deepened in recent years by my personal experience as a Carleton parent. I have seen first-hand the impact of Carleton’s stellar faculty, dedicated staff, and committed alumni and friends on the education and lives of students. I look forward to working with the entire community to make Carleton even stronger in the future than it is today.”

Carleton College is highly selective and enrolls just over 2,100 students, according to the latest data furnished by the U.S. Department of Education. Women make up 51 percent of the student body.

In 2013, Dr. Byerly became the 17th president of Lafayette College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in Easton, Pennsylvania. Dr. Byerly was the first woman to serve as president of Lafayette College, which was founded in 1826. From 2007 to 2013, she was provost and executive vice president at Middlebury College in Vermont, where she joined the faculty in 1989.

Dr. Byerly is the author of Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (University of Michigan Press, 2012) and Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Dr. Byerly is a native of Glenside, Pennsylvania. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she majored in English. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.