Swarthmore College, the highly rated liberal arts educational institution in Pennsylvania, has promoted five scholars to the rank of full professor. Three of these promotions went to women.
Diane Anderson is a professor of educational studies. Professor Anderson previously served as the associate dean for academic affairs for eight years. She uses active experiences and ethnographic methods to explore the power of the social identities of readers, writers, and learners. Dr. Anderson is a graduate of what is now Montclair State University in New Jersey. She holds a master’s degree from Drexel University in Philadelphia and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Lara Cohen is a professor of English literature. She teaches courses on early American literature, especially nineteenth-century African American literature. Professor Cohen is the author of Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Duke University Press, 2023) and The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). Professor Cohen joined the faculty at Swarthmore in 2013.
Nsoki Mavinga was promoted to professor of mathematics. She joined the faculty in 2014 after teaching at the University of Rochester in New York. Her research focuses on nonlinear analysis and partial differential equations. She is particularly interested in the solvability of nonlinear second order parabolic and elliptic partial differential equations subject to nonlinear boundary conditions, and how these problems interrelate with physical and biological phenomena. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.