Swarthmore College

Publishing

We’re always looking for writing to be published here on our site. Send us a question for Dear AF or your own manifesto for liberal education. Contact us if you have an idea for a piece you would like to pitch!

Scholarly Promotion

Are you publishing a new book or other significant work? We can provide funding and support in developing ideas for a launch event to help disseminate your project and enrich its impact. In partnership with Swarthmore College Libraries, we’re offering support to Swarthmore faculty and staff to promote a recent publication or forthcoming signature scholarly or artistic work.

Curricular Grants

We’re offering grants to support Swarthmore faculty developing assignments, projects, or entire courses that include research, writing, discussion, and reflection on topics related to the history, present, and future of liberal arts and/or higher education. Applications are rolling and will continue to be evaluated monthly until we reach the annual budget’s limit. 

Cross-Institutional Teaching Collaborations

Are you teaching a course with faculty or students from other institutions? Let us know. Our primary interest is in discovering what students and faculty learn from cross-institutional courses of this kind that they might not otherwise learn; we also hope to hear what you’ve found valuable about teaching across institutions, and what resources you need to continue to do it.

Professional Practices

We’re extremely interested in data or evidence about professional practices in liberal education, including innovative methodological strategies. Please talk to us, whether it’s about your own scholarly work or about an initiative or collaborative project you are involved in. Or just make suggestions! We want to find ways to know more about what people do in their classrooms, in their curricular designs, in planning their scholarship.

Consulting

We’re thinking about what a faculty-based consultancy across institutions might look like. If this interests you as well, contact us; we’d like to hear more.

Staff Involvement

If you’re Swarthmore faculty or staff, watch for our Tuesday Cafe series, dinner discussions, research seminars, public writing workshops, and other events and programs.

Research Fellows

Do you want to think about how demands for racial justice, labor market struggles, the changing climate, and ongoing culture wars have recast our understanding of what the liberal arts is and what it has been? Are you interested in doing research on what colleges might and ought to become in the future?

Swarthmore students can apply to be a student research fellow. Applications for the 2023-24 academic year are now closed. If you are interested in the position or have any questions, please contact Marianne Dages (mdages1@swarthmore.edu), the Administrative Assistant for the Aydelotte Foundation.

Swarthmore students should also consider taking one of the courses we teach semi-regularly.

Aydelotte Foundation
Parrish Hall W201
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore, PA 19081

610-328-8000
aydelotte@swarthmore.edu

Events
Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 7 – 9pm 

Anna Shechtman ’13 Reading: The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle

McCabe LibLab, Full Space, Conference Room

Aydelotte Foundation Media, Art, and Technology Series
Anna Shechtman ’13 reading from her new book
The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle (March 2024)
Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at 7pm, LibLab, McCabe Library, Swarthmore College

Anna Shechtman ’13 published her first crossword puzzle in the NY Times when she was nineteen and later spearheaded the The New Yorker’s popular crossword section. Working with a medium often criticized as exclusionary, elitist, and out-of-touch, Anna is one of very few women in the field of puzzle making, where she strives to make the everyday diversion more diverse. 

After graduating with highest honors in English Literature from Swarthmore, Anna received her Ph.D in English and Film and Media Studies Yale. She currently Klarman Fellow at Cornell University, where she will begin as an assistant professor in the English department in Fall 2024. The Riddles of the Sphinx, about the history of the crossword puzzle and the sexual politics of wordplay, will be published by HarperOne in March 2024. Anna’s writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Representations, The Yale Review and Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor-at-large.

On March 21 at 4:30 in McCabe Library LibLab, Anna will be leading a seminar on her scholarly work-in-progress, The Media Concept: A Genealogy. To attend please rsvp here.

Shechtman’s visit is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s Spring ’24 series Media, Art and Technology. Cosponsored by Art History, Film and Media Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Libraries

Thursday, March 28, 2024, 4:30 – 6pm 

Latinx TV: Latina and Latino Storytellers Making an Impact

Kohlberg Hall Scheuer Room - Multi-Purpose Room
Aydelotte Foundation Media, Art, and Technology Series
Mary Beltrán Latinx TV: Latina and Latino Storytellers Making an Impact
4:30-6pm, Scheuer, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College

Based on her research for the book Latino TV: A History, Dr. Beltrán explores how Latino and Latina writers and TV show runners since the 2000s have produced compelling programs that depict Latina/os with complexity and nuance, and how Latina series creators have made a particular impact since the 2010s.

Mary Beltrán is Professor of Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and a faculty affiliate of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications include Latino TV: A History, Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes, and the co-edited anthology Mixed Race Hollywood.Co-sponsored by the Department of Film & Media Studies and the Latin American & Latino Studies Program
Friday, April 5, 2024, 4:30 – 6pm 

Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy in conversation on Command Power

Hormel/Nguyen Intercultural Center at Sproul Hall Room 201 Dome Room

The Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College is pleased to invite you to a conversation with Jodi Melamed and Chandan Reddy. They will discuss their collaborative work on “command power,” their descriptive term for how liberalism functions as a racial capitalist world-making praxis, rather than as a philosophy of freedom or just order. Andy Hines will moderate the conversation.

The event will be held on Friday, April 5 at 4:30pm ET in the IC Dome at Swarthmore. It is open to all in the Tri-Co community and to the public. 

The event is part of the Aydelotte Foundation’s project on “Race, Racism, and the Liberal Arts.” This project assembles work on underrepresented histories of how people, institutions, and ideas have existed outside of, pushed against, or reshaped from within the ideas and institutions of the liberal arts. It also investigates and recounts curricular, epistemological, and institutional genealogies that challenge how or whether the term liberal arts has silenced histories and ways of knowing developed by Black people, indigenous people, and people of color. 

More information about the featured speakers can be found below. Please visit our website for updates on this research initiative, including additional events and publications.

Jodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University. For spring semester 2024 she will serve as the Norman Freehling Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2011), co-editor of Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism (with Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Chandan Reddy), a special issue of the journal Social Text.  Her influential essay, “Racial Capitalism,” is among the most cited articles in the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Her current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Powers (with Chandan Reddy) is under contract with Verso Books. 

Chandan Reddy is Associate Professor in the departments of the Comparative History of Ideas and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. His book, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (2011) from Duke University Press won the Alan Bray Memorial award for Queer studies from the MLA as well as the Best Book in Cultural Studies from the Asian American Studies Association, both in 2013. He is co-editor (with Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, and Jodi Melamed) of the special issue, “"Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism," Social Text (Spring 2018). His current book project, Operationalizing Racial Capitalism: On Liberalism’s Command Powers (with Jodi Melamed) is under contract with Verso Books. 

Andy Hines is Senior Associate Director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (Chicago, 2022) and the editor of University Keywords (under contract, Hopkins).

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