Six Women Faculty Members at Swarthmore College Have Been Promoted and Granted Tenure

Swarthmore College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in suburban Philadelphia, has announced that nine faculty members have been promoted to associate professor and granted tenure. six of the nine promotions were offered to women.

Dawn Carone (biology) investigates functional roles for repetitive elements in the human genome and the implications of misregulation of repetitive elements in disease. Current projects in the lab aim to understand both the cause and consequence of locus-specific expression of HSATII, a pericentric, tandemly repeated satellite sequence, in cancer cells.

Désirée Díaz (Spanish) specializes in Latin American literature and visual culture with an emphasis on the Hispanic Caribbean. Her first book, Ciudadanías liminales. Vida cotidiana y espacio urbano en la Cuba postsoviética (Almenara, 2021), explores the emergence of alternative forms of citizenship and the production of an independent public sphere in post-Soviet Cuban literature and visual culture. Dr. Díaz earned a bachelor’s degree in the history of art from the University of Havana. She holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Sangina Patnaik (English literature) investigates global modernism, critical legal studies, and human rights. She is working on a book project titled What We Owe: Reparations, Human Rights, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Dr. Patnick earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation was entitled “The Wake of War: Reparation in Law and Literature.”

Jennifer Peck (economics and environmental studies) researches the development of resource-rich countries, linking topics in labor, development, and energy economics. Before coming to Swarthmore, Peck was a research affiliate in the Evidence for Policy Design group at the Harvard Kennedy School and a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Peck is a graduate of Swarthmore College and earned a Ph.D. in economics at MIT.

Emily Paddon Rhoads (political science) conducts research in the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and peace and conflict studies. She is the author of Taking Sides in Peacekeeping: Impartiality and the Future of the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dr. Paddon Rhodes is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in England.

Working at the intersection of literature, history, and dance studies, Olivia Sabee (music and dance) is a scholar of 18th- and 19th-century France and Franco-Italian cultural exchange. Her book Theories of Ballet in the Age of the Encyclopédie (Oxford Studies in the Enlightenment, 2022) examines 18th-century ballet’s construction through print culture. Dr. Sabee holds a bachelor’s degree in French from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in French from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.