List of Swarthmore College people

Updated on Oct 12, 2024

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The following is a list of notable people associated with Swarthmore College, a private, independent, liberal arts college located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Nobel laureates

Listed chronologically by year of the award.

MacArthur Fellows

Listed chronologically by year of the grant.

List of alumni

Listed in alphabetical order by surname.

Architecture

Kai Gutschow PhD - Carnegie Mellon University, School of Architecture

Frances Halsband - FAIA, former Dean of School of Architecture at Pratt Institute

Margaret Helfand - FAIA (attended 1965–68)

Steven Izenour

Marianne McKenna - RIBA

Catherine Paplin

Arts, film, theatre, and broadcasting

Joseph Altuzarra – fashion designer, winner of the 2011 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Award

Lisa Albert – television producer and writer, Mad Men, Beautiful People, Living Single, Becker, Murphy Brown, Major Dad

Mark Alburger – composer; founder / music director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra; music director of Goat Hall Productions; founder / editor-publisher of 21st-Century Music.

Ed Ayres – environmentalist; writer; editor; publisher of Running Times magazine; author of God's Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future and Crossing the Energy Divide: Moving from Fossil-Fuel Dependence to a Clean Energy Future

Miyuki Baker – mixed-media artist and activist

Peter Bart – Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Variety

Al Carmines – composer of Off-Broadway musicals; pastor

Marshall Curry – documentary filmmaker of Street Fight, If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front, Racing Dreams, and Point and Shoot; 2006 Oscar nominee for Documentary Feature; 2006 News & Documentary Emmy Award nominee for Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story: Long Form; 2012 Oscar nominee for Documentary Feature

David Dye – radio personality and host of the World Cafe

Judith Edelman – musician

Michael Forster Rothbart – photojournalist

David Gelber – Executive Producer, 60 Minutes on CBS

Evan Gregory – member of The Gregory Brothers (creators of Auto-tune the News)

Steven Izenour – architect; co-author of Learning from Las Vegas

Susan Jolles – harpist

Nick Kazan (1969) – screenwriter

H. C. Robbins Landon – musicologist

Stephen Lang – Tony Award-nominated actor and playwright; star of Gods and Generals, Gettysburg, Tombstone, and Terra Nova

David Linde – Executive Producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Y Tu Mamá También; co-founder of Focus Features; Co-Chair of Universal Studios

Beth Littleford – former Daily Show correspondent, Comedy Central personality, and actress

Dana Lyons (1982) – independent singer/songwriter

Richard Martin (1967) – art and fashion historian; former Curator-in-Chief of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dawn Porter (1988) – documentary filmmaker, director of Gideon's Army, nominee for News & Documentary Emmy Award

Erik Rehl – Art Director for Oscar-winning Best Live Action Short Film 2006, Six Shooter, by Martin McDonagh

Dan Rothenberg – Co-Artistic Director of Pig Iron Theatre Company

Ike Schambelan – founder, Theater Breaking Through Barriers in New York City

Peter Schickele – composer, often under the comic pseudonym P. D. Q. Bach

Aaron Schwartz – actor, director and copyright lawyer in Toronto

Tom Snyder – founder of Soup2Nuts (formerly Tom Snyder Productions) animation studio; co-creator and Executive Producer, Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist; Executive Producer, Home Movies

Robert Storr – Dean of the Yale School of Art; curator; painter; critic; director of Venice Biennale 2007

Darko Tresnjak (1988) – Director, Artistic Director of the Old Globe Shakespeare Festival in San Diego; CA; 2014 Tony Award winner for Best Direction of a Musical, A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder

Kenneth Turan – movie reviewer, Los Angeles Times

Robert C. Turner – ceramic artist

Dito van Reigersberg – Co-Artistic Director of Pig Iron Theatre Company

Michael J. Weithorn (1978) – television producer and writer, The King of Queens, Family Ties, Ned & Stacey, The Goldbergs

Thomas Whitman – composer; Swarthore Associate Music Professor

Paul Williams – founder and publisher of Crawdaddy!

Business

Shola Abidoye (1997) – Co-Founding Manager, Africast.com

Burt Alper (1991) – CEO, Catchword

Neil R. Austrian (1961) – former President of NFL, Interim Chairman and CEO, Office Depot

Sherry F. Bellamy (1974) – President and CEO, Bell Atlantic-Maryland

Mark Benerofe (1981) – Vice-President, Sony Online Ventures

Peter Cohan (1979) – President, Peter S. Cohan & Associates

John Diebold (1949) – founder of Diebold Group, Diebold, Inc., and The Diebold Institute for Public Policy

John D. Goldman (1971) – CEO, Richard N. Goldman & Co. Insurance Services; President, San Francisco Symphony

Samuel L. Hayes III (1957) – Director, Tiffany & Co., Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School

Mickey Herbert (1967) – President and CEO, the Bridgeport Bluefish Baseball Club

Roger Holstein (1974) – CEO, WebMD

Gil Kemp (1972) – President and founder, Home Decorators Collection

Jerome Kohlberg, Jr. (1946) – billionaire (Forbes 400 Richest in America); co-founder, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

Frederick W. Kyle (1954) – Chairman, BioRexis Pharmaceutical Corporation

Eugene M. Lang (1938) – founder of REFAC Technology Development Corporation, philanthropist

Randall Larrimore (1969) – former President and CEO, United Stationers Inc., a Fortune 500 company

Leland S. MacPhail (1939) – President, National League Baseball, General Manager, the New York Yankees

Frank Herbert Martin (1956) – CEO of C F Martin & Company

Nick Martin (2004) – founder and CEO of TechChange

Thomas B. McCabe (1915) – Chairman, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, President, Scott Paper

John N. Montgomery (1977) – founder, President, and Director of Bridgeway Funds

Arthur S. Obermayer – founder of the Moleculon Research Corporation; Jewish-American philanthropist.

Thomas Rowe Price, Jr. (1919) – founder of T. Rowe Price

Carl Russo (1979) – President and CEO, Calix Inc., former Vice President of Optical Strategy, Cisco Systems

Kate Warne – Principal, Investment Strategist, Edward Jones Investments

Michael Wing (1970) – Vice President, Strategic Communications, IBM

Economics

David Andrews (1982) – economics historian, professor at State University of New York at Oswego, author of Keynes and the British Humanist Tradition: The Moral Purpose of the Market

Dean Baker (1981) – macroeconomist; co-founder and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

Robert Cooter (1967) – scholar in law and economics, Professor at UC Berkeley School of Law

Andre Gunder Frank (1957) – German-American economic historian and sociologist; developer of dependency theory

Diana Furchtgott-Roth (1979) – former Chief Economist of the United States Department of Labor, former chief of staff of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Michael Greenstone (1991) – 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT, director of the Hamilton Project

Peter J. Katzenstein (1967) – Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies at Cornell University; member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Clark Kerr (1932) – industrial economist, first chancellor of University of California, Berkeley, twelfth president of the University of California

William N. Kinnard (1947) – former Director of the Institute of Urban Research; Founding Director of the Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics; leading author, lecturer, and expert on the topic of real estate valuation; his text, Income Property Valuation, published in 1971, is still considered a classic in the field

Arnold Kling (1975) – founder and co-editor of EconLog, a popular economics blog

Thomas Bayard McCabe (1893-1982) – Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (1948-1951)

Jeffrey Miron (1979) – chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University, 1992-1998; director of undergraduate studies in the Harvard University Department of Economics, director of economic studies at the Cato Institute

William Poole (1959) – eleventh president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

Edward C. Prescott (1962) – winner of 2004 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

Iqbal Quadir (1982) – founder of Gonofone and GrameenPhone; founder and Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT

Hans Stoll (1962) – The Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker, Jr. Professor of Finance and Director of the Financial Markets Research Center at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management; former president of American Finance Association

Peter Temin (1959) – economic historian, Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

E. Roy Weintraub (1964) – Professor of Economics at Duke University focusing on the history of the interconnection between mathematics and economics in the twentieth century

Martin Weitzman (1963) – Environmental economist and Professor of Economics at Harvard University

Education

Patrick Awuah, Jr. (1988) – founder, Ashesi University, Ghana's first liberal arts college

David Baltimore (1960) – President of Caltech; Nobel Prize winner

Nancy Y. Bekavac – first female president of Scripps College

Detlev W. Bronk – former President, Johns Hopkins University

Kimberly Wright Cassidy – President, Bryn Mawr College

Paul Courant – Provost, University of Michigan

Sean M. Decatur – President, Kenyon College

Christopher Edley, Jr. – Dean of University of California, Berkeley School of Law

Neil R. Grabois – former Provost, Williams College; former President, Colgate University

Tori Haring-Smith – President, Washington and Jefferson College

Rachel Jacobs (1997)

John H. Jacobson – former President, Hope College

Clark Kerr – first Chancellor, the University of California, Berkeley and 12th President, the University of California

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot (1966) – Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education; Chairman of the Board, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; first African-American woman in Harvard University's history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor

Richard Wall Lyman – former President (7th), Stanford University

Christina Hull Paxson (1982)- President-elect (19th), Brown University

David H. Porter (1958) – former President, Skidmore College

Robert Prichard – former President (13th), University of Toronto

Dorothy Kathryn Robinson (1972) – Vice President and General Counsel of Yale University

Lawrence Schall (1975) – President, Oglethorpe University

Alan Valentine – former President, University of Rochester

Helen Magill White – first woman in the US to earn a Ph.D.

Phyllis Wise – Provost, University of Washington

Historians

Margaret Lavinia Anderson – University of California, Berkeley

Pamela Kyle Crossley – Dartmouth College

Philip Curtin – Distinguished professor of African history, Johns Hopkins University

Linda Gordon – New York University (NYU)

Daniel Headrick – Roosevelt University

Pieter M. Judson – Swarthmore College

Seth Koven – Rutgers

Thomas Laqueur – University of California, Berkeley

David Montgomery – Yale (emeritus)

John H. Morrow Jr. – University of Georgia at Athens

Nayan Shah – University of California at San Diego

Barbara Sicherman – Trinity College

Matthew H. Sommer – Stanford

Gavin Wright – Stanford University

Maochun Miles Yu – United States Naval Academy

Tara Zahra – University of Chicago

Humanities and law

T. Alexander Aleinikoff (1974) – Dean, Georgetown University Law Center (law school)

Robert R. Ammerman (1952) – Emeritus Professor of Philosophy (Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy), University of Wisconsin-Madison

Elizabeth Anderson – Professor of Philosophy (ethics, social and political philosophy), University of Michigan

Adrienne Asch (1946-2013) – founding director of the Center for Ethics at Yeshiva University

Leo Braudy (1963) – University and Leo S. Bing Professor of English and American Literature, University of Southern California

Peter Berkowitz – The Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution

Cora Diamond – Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Virginia

Stephen Diamond – Professor of Law, University of Miami

Frank H. Easterbrook (1970) – Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

Christopher Edley, Jr. (1973) – Dean, University of California, Berkeley School of Law

Marjorie Garber – Director, the Humanities Center at Harvard University; Shakespeare scholar; cultural critic

Allan Gibbard – Professor of Philosophy (ethics), University of Michigan

Michael Hardt – Professor of Literature, Duke University; author of Empire.

Gilbert Harman – Professor of Philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind), Princeton University

Randy Holland (1969) – Justice, Delaware Supreme Court

James C. Hormel (1955) – former dean, University of Chicago Law School

Ray Jackendoff – Professor of Linguistics – Tufts University

David Lewis – Professor of Philosophy (philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics), Princeton University

Wilma A. Lewis (1978) – former United States Attorney, District of Columbia

Eben Moglen (1980) – professor of law and legal history, Columbia University; general counsel and board member at the Free Software Foundation; co-author of the original GNU General Public License

Alexander Nehamas – Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature (Greek philosophy, philosophy of art), Princeton University

Alexander Mitchell Palmer (1891) – United States Attorney General (1919–1921)

Richard D. Parker (1967) – professor, Harvard Law School

Barbara Partee – Emeritus Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Jed S. Rakoff (1964) – legal scholar, judge on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York

Jerry (Jerome) Ravetz – Philosopher of Science; pioneer of post-normal science; founder of The Research Methods Consultancy; Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Dorothy Kathryn Robinson (1972) – Vice President and General Counsel of Yale University

Hillyer Rudisill III – Professor of Philosophy (philosophy, ethics), Trident Technical College

Charles F.C. Ruff (1960) – Special Prosecutor during the Watergate scandal, defender of Anita Hill during confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, counsel to President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal

Jerome Schiller – Emeritus Professor of Philosophy (ancient philosophy), Washington University

Mary M. Schroeder (1962) – Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Stewart J. Schwab (1975) – Dean and Professor of Law, Cornell Law School

Mark D. Schwartz (1975) – attorney in private practice; former first vice president of Prudential-Bache Securities's public-finance department

Peter Unger – Professor of Philosophy (epistemology, metaphysics), New York University

Melissa Zeiger – Professor of English Literature, Dartmouth College

Christina Crosby – Professor of English Literature, Professor of English, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Wesleyan University

Natural science, medicine, and engineering

Ted Abel – Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Margaret Allen – first female heart transplant surgeon

Dave Bayer – math consultant, A Beautiful Mind

Christopher F. Chyba – Professor at Princeton University

Paul Crowell – Professor of Physics, University of Minnesota

William J. Erdman II – physician; chairman of the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Sandra Moore Faber – astronomer, member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, diagnosis and repair of the Hubble Space Telescope's spherical aberration, design of the DEep Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS) for the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii

Dean Freed (1943) – former CEO and Chairman of EG&G (now called PerkinElmer, Inc.)

Neil Gershenfeld – Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms

William H. Goldstein – Associate Director for Physics & Advanced Technologies, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

William H. Green – Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, leader of the Reaction Mechanism Generator project

John J. Hopfield – Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University; member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society

Martin Krafft (2001) – free software researcher and activist, Debian developer

Tyler Lyson (2006) – discovered a mummified hadrosaur

Robert MacPherson (1966) – mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University; National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics (1992); Leroy P. Steele Prize (2002, with Goresky); Heinz Hopf Prize (2009)

Holbrook Mann MacNeille – mathematician; professor; Scientific Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development; chief of the Fundamental Research Branch of the United States Atomic Energy Commission

John C. Mather – Senior Astrophysicist, Infrared Astrophysics Branch at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center; 2006 Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the cosmic microwave background

Rogers McVaugh – professor of botany; UNC herbarium's curator of Mexican plants; Adjunct Research Scientist of the Hunt Institute in Carnegie Mellon University; Professor Emeritus of botany in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Ted Nelson – computer visionary; coined the term "hypertext"

Frank Oski – Director of Pediatrics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Nancy Roman – astronomer; one of "the inspirational women" of NASA

Anne Schuchat – Acting Director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases (NCID), Centers for Disease Control (CDC)

Maxine Frank Singer – biochemist, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington since 1988

Charlotte Moore Sitterly – astronomer; identified chemical elements in the sun using spectroscopy

Frederick Snyder, M.D. (1948) – pioneer in the study of REM sleep

Joseph Takahashi – neuroscientist at Northwestern University; member of the National Academy of Sciences; Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; identified key genes involved in mammalian circadian rhythms

Richard Vallee – pathologist, Columbia University Medical Center, discoverer of cytoplasmic dynein

Peter J. Weinberger – computer scientist; former head of CS Research at Bell Labs; inventor of the AWK programming language

Politics and government

Samuel Assefa – Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States

Erica Barks-Ruggles – U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda

William H. Brown, Jr. – parliamentarian, the United States House of Representatives

Armond Budish – Democratic Minority Leader of Ohio House of Representatives

John S. Burns – Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress author of ArgMax.com, declared one of the top five economics blogs by Forbes magazine

Dennis Cheng – national finance director of the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton

Scott Cowger – Democratic state legislator from Maine

Peter Deutsch – Democratic member of the House of Representatives, 1993–2005; represented Florida's 20th congressional district

Michael Dukakis – Governor of Massachusetts; Democratic nominee in the 1988 presidential election

Christiana Figueres – Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)

Robert P. George – member, President's Council on Bioethics; professor, Princeton University

Mark Hanis – co-founder of the Genocide Intervention Network

Leon Henderson – administrator of the Office of Price Administration, 1941-1942

James Hormel – former ambassador to Luxembourg, first openly gay U.S. Ambassador

Eugene M. Lang – philanthropist, founder of the I Have A Dream Foundation; 1996 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Carl Levin – Democratic U.S. Senator from Michigan

Alice Paul – women's suffrage leader from 1913 onwards, author of first Equal Rights Amendment proposal

Amos J. Peaslee – former ambassador to Australia

Robert D. Putnam – social capital theorist, author of Bowling Alone, Harvard University professor

Antoinette Sayeh – Minister of Finance, Liberia

William C. Sproul – former governor of Pennsylvania

Chris Van Hollen – Democratic U.S. Representative

Cathy Wilkerson – radical activist and former member of the Weather Underground, known for being present at the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion

James Morrison Wilson, Jr. – career diplomat; Foreign Service officer; Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific; U.S. Deputy Representative for Micronesian Status Negotiations; Department of State Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (1975–1977)

Carl Wittman – writer, LGBT rights activist and member of the national council of Students for a Democratic Society

Molly Yard – former President of the National Organization for Women

Psychology

Dorwin P. Cartwright – pioneer in topological psychology

Adele Diamond – pioneer in developmental cognitive neuroscience; professor at The University of British Columbia

Eugene Galanter – pioneer in cognitive psychology and psychometrics; Professor Emeritus, Columbia University

Carol Gilligan – recipient of Grawemeyer Award; professor at New York University

Isabel Myers – co-creator of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Robert Rescorla – co-creator of the Rescorla-Wagner model; professor at University of Pennsylvania

Sports

Ed Ayres (1963) – ultramarathon runner; winner of JFK 50 Mile; editor and publisher of Running Times magazine

Robin Carpenter (2014) – professional road cyclist

Ben Clime – NFL player

Dick Hall – former Major League Baseball pitcher; appeared in three World Series for the Baltimore Orioles, 1969–71

Morgan Langley – player with the Philadelphia Union in Major League Soccer

Ladulé Lako LoSarah – professional soccer player with FK Bregalnica Stip; first American to play in Macedonian Prva Liga

Tiny Maxwell – College Football Hall of Fame player and referee

Technology

Nick Martin (2004) – founder and CEO of TechChange

Writers, journalists, and publishers

Rasheed Abou-Alsamh – Saudi writer and journalist

Peter Bart – Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of Variety

David G. Bradley – chair of The Atlantic Monthly and National Journal Group, Inc.

Ben Brantley – chief theater critic of The New York Times

Heywood Hale Broun – sportswriter and CBS Sports commentator

Maureen B. Cavanaugh – professor of classics; author of Eleusis and Athens: Documents in Finance, Religion, and Politics in the Fifth Century B.C.

Amy Fine Collins – special correspondent on fashion, culture, style, and design for Vanity Fair

Samuel H. Day – former Managing Editor of The Progressive

Diane Di Prima – Beat generation poet

Kurt Eichenwald – New York Times reporter and author of books on white-collar crime (Serpent on the Rock, The Informant, Conspiracy of Fools)

Julie Falk (1998) – Executive Director of Bitch Media

Jonathan Franzen – author of The Corrections; winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction

Daisy Fried (1989) – poet, author of My Brother is Getting Arrested Again and She Didn't Mean to Do It

Robyn Geary – Managing Editor, The Washingtonian

Gregory Gibson – author of Gone Boy, Demon of the Waters, and Hubert’s Freaks

Justin Hall – pioneer blogger

Adam Haslett (1992) – author of You Are Not a Stranger Here (Pulitzer Prize finalist, National Book Award finalist, and 2002 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award winner); stories in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope All-Story, and National Public Radio’s Selected Shorts

Marni Hodgkin, children's book editor

Josef Joffe – Editor in Chief, Die Zeit

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt – journalist, book review and obit editor for New York Times

Cynthia Leive – Editor in Chief, Glamour

Mark Lotto – Senior Editor, GQ

Helen Reimensnyder Martin (1868–1939) – novelist

James A. Michener – novelist

Victor Navasky – publisher and Editorial Director of The Nation (1995–2005); Chair of Columbia Journalism Review

Drew Pearson – journalist

Jon Raymond – novelist, short story writer, and co-writer of the films Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy

Rishi Reddi – short story writer

Rudy Rucker – cyberpunk novelist; winner of two Philip K. Dick Awards

Norman Rush – novelist, winner of the 1991 National Book Award for Mating

William Saletan – Chief National Correspondent for Slate.com; author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War

Martha Shirk – reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1975-1996; co-author of On Their Own; Kitchen Table Entrepreneurs; Lives on the Line; and Super Family Vacations

Nora Waln – journalist and memoirist on China and Nazi Germany

Micah White – creator of Occupy Wall Street

Mary Wiltenburg – journalist

Valerie Worth (d. 1994) – poet and writer; especially known for her children's poems

Jason Zengerle – Senior Editor, The New Republic