Carleton announces Fall 2025 faculty promotions
The promotions are approved by the Board of Trustees and took effect this term.
One Carleton faculty member has been named to an endowed chair and six more have been promoted from associate professor to full professor. Three faculty on continuing appointment have also been promoted. The promotions have been approved by the Carleton Board of Trustees and took effect on September 1, 2025.
Meet the newly promoted faculty members:
NAMED TO ENDOWED CHAIR
George Shuffelton, Helen F. Lewis Professor of English
Professor Shuffelton has taught in the English department at Carleton since 2002. His recent course offerings have included The Other Worlds of Medieval Literature, Medieval Narrative, and a first-year seminar on the history and science of reading. He also frequently teaches courses that focus on oral presentation, rhetoric, and the skills necessary for college writing.
After receiving an AB in history and literature from Harvard University, Shuffelton was a Henry Fellow at Cambridge University, where he earned an MPhil in medieval literature. He also earned a PhD in English literature from Yale University.
His research focuses on the history and literature of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England. His edition of a late-medieval manuscript, Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, was published by the Medieval Institute in 2008. In recent years, he has published work on Chaucer’s reputation for obscenity in the American legal tradition, historical writing in medieval London, friendships among alumni of medieval universities, and the anxieties over choosing a career in fifteenth-century England.
At Carleton, Shuffelton currently serves as interim associate provost, and has served as faculty president, associate dean of the College, accreditation liaison with the Higher Learning Commission, co-chair of the Education and Curriculum Committee, chair of the English department, and on the Faculty Personnel Committee.
PROMOTED FROM ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR TO FULL PROFESSOR
Peter Balaam, Professor of English
Professor Balaam came to Carleton as assistant professor of English in 2003 and was granted tenure in 2009. He teaches an array of courses in the English department as well as for adjacent programs at the College, balancing a focus on canonical writers traditional to his field with interdisciplinary approaches that incorporate important contexts in theology, literary theory, philosophy, race, gender, and psychoanalysis. A sampling of his courses for English include: American Transcendentalists, The American Best-Seller, The Bible as Literature, Children’s Literature, and Whose Freud?
Balaam studied English at University of California–Berkeley before earning a Master of Divinity at Princeton Theological Seminary (1992) and an MA/PhD (1994/2000) in English at Princeton University.
With a specialization in nineteenth-century American literature, Balaam’s scholarly interventions into American literary culture are consistently informed by his theological interests and turn most recently toward the epistemological, ethical, and environmental questions of the Anthropocene. The author of Misery’s Mathematics (Routledge 2009), he has also published articles on Herman Melville, the novelist Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop in relation to the critical classroom pedagogy, “close reading.” Balaam’s most recent work responds directly to environmental and ethical questions around the life humans live among non-human animals.
Balaam has served on a number of Carleton’s elected committees — College Council, Faculty Personnel Committee, Education and Curriculum Committee — and was charged with overseeing the rollout of Carleton’s Argument & Inquiry (A&I) Seminars program. In 2022, he chaired the Internal Review Committee for the program review of the Cowling Arboretum.
Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Professor of Political Science
Professor Czobor-Lupp started teaching at Carleton as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2010. In addition to teaching more regular courses like Political Philosophy and Post-Modern Political Thought, Czobor-Lupp has developed an array of courses that explore and discuss topics such as freedom and resistance under totalitarian political regimes, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the ethics and politics of hospitality, and memory and politics. She combines political theory and philosophy with history, literature, and film.
Czobor-Lupp did her undergraduate studies in philosophy and history during the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. After graduating from the University of Bucharest in 1986, until the end of the regime in 1989, she worked as a social sciences teacher in a rural high school. She started an MA in philosophy and social theory at the University of Warwick, UK in 1991 before joining the faculty at the University of Bucharest in 1992, where she was awarded her PhD in philosophy in 1996. After a decade of teaching political science and philosophy there, she emigrated to the United States and pursued a second PhD in government at Georgetown University.
Czobor-Lupp has published extensively in Romanian and in English. In addition to two single-authored books, The Mirror and The Shadow. E.T.A. Hoffmann: The Phenomenology of the Romantic Ego (1999) and Imagination in Politics: Freedom or Domination? (2014), she also co-edited Moral, Legal, and Political Values in Romanian Culture (2002) with her husband, Joerg-Stefan Lupp. In her papers, Czobor-Lupp theorizes on issues such as intercultural understanding, constitutional patriotism, cosmopolitan care, the idea of Europe, the emancipatory power of religion, art and humanism, memory as resistance to nationalism, and dissidence in Eastern Europe.
At Carleton, Czobor-Lupp has served on the Carleton Responsible Investment Committee, Academic Standing Committee, and Student Fellowships Committee. In 2016–17, she was the director of the Faculty Research Seminar for the Humanities Center. Currently, she is serving on the Off-Campus Studies Committee and is the chair of the Department of Political Science.
Amna Khalid, Professor of History
Professor Khalid came to Carleton in 2011 as an assistant professor in history. She has taught courses on South Asia’s colonial history, post-independence relations between India and Pakistan, the political and social history of India’s partition, and the relationship between colonial expansion and the spread of disease. She has also been an active citizen of the College and responsible for organizing many events related to academic freedom, free expression, the role of well-meaning elites in perpetuating inequalities, and art as a means of resisting authoritarianism.
After completing her bachelor’s degree in social sciences with a minor in economics, Khalid earned her MPhil in development studies and her DPhil in history from the University of Oxford. Before moving to the United States, Khalid was a lecturer for the master’s program in the history of medicine at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex, and a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Khalid specializes in South Asian history and the history of medicine. Over the last decade, Khalid has also collaborated extensively with Carleton educational studies professor Jeff Snyder ’97 (also promoted this term) to study and defend academic freedom and free expression, especially as they relate to liberal arts education. Their numerous articles on these topics have been published in newspapers and magazines, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Republic, and Washington Monthly. Their work has also been cited in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. They have delivered dozens of invited talks across the country.
At Carleton, Khalid served on the special Academic Freedom Task Force, which drafted a new academic freedom statement for the College that was passed with overwhelming faculty support and approved by the Board of Trustees during the 2023–24 academic year. She is also currently the director of the Asian Studies Program.
Alex Knodell, Professor of Classics
Professor Knodell joined the Department of Classics at Carleton in 2014 and has directed or co-directed the archaeology program since 2015. Since 2023, he has also chaired the Department of Classics. Knodell offers a range of courses concerning the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean world, world archaeology, and classical studies. Most of his teaching examines the past through its material remains and aims to demonstrate how archaeology and classical studies shape — and critique — constructions of the past in the present. Particular subjects include the archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome, Mediterranean prehistory, archaeological method, island studies, and a global prehistory survey. He also teaches courses that deal more broadly with the cultures and languages of the ancient Mediterranean.
Knodell earned his PhD in archaeology from Brown University in 2013 and a BA in anthropology, classics, and classical humanities in 2007. Prior to Carleton, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
As a researcher, Knodell’s interests are eclectic, but mostly engage themes of landscape and interaction, especially notions of territory, polity, and long-term social change. He is an active field archaeologist, especially in Greece, where he has co-directed the Small Cycladic Islands Project since 2019 and co-directed the Mazi Archaeological Project from 2014–2017. Beyond fieldwork, his publications include two books and over 40 articles, book chapters, and reviews. His monograph, Societies in Transition in Early Greece: An Archaeological History (University of California Press 2021), used aspects of network theory and settlement pattern analysis to overturn the long-dominant narrative of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. His recent work has focused on applications of LiDAR technology to the study of Mediterranean landscapes and developing new practical and theoretical approaches to the archaeology of surveillance.
In addition to his work as a program director and department chair at Carleton, Knodell has served on the Faculty Affairs Committee and the Humanities Center Advisory Board, in addition to several other appointments.
Anna Rafferty, Professor of Computer Science
Professor Rafferty joined the Carleton computer science department as an assistant professor in 2014. She teaches a wide range of courses, including computer science theory, programming-focused courses, and electives related to artificial intelligence. Many of her electives have interdisciplinary themes, such as an applications-focused machine learning course and a course on computational models of cognition. With the rise of machine learning in everyday life, Rafferty’s courses have placed increasing emphasis on assessing the system’s strengths and weaknesses, including identifying bias and evaluating fairness.
Rafferty earned her PhD in computer science from the University of California–Berkeley, conducting interdisciplinary work in cognitive science, education, and computer science. Rafferty’s passion for interdisciplinary work began during her time as an undergraduate at Stanford University, where she earned a BA in feminist studies and a BS and co-terminal MS in symbolic systems.
In her research, Rafferty addresses questions in education and cognition using machine learning tools, and draws inspiration from these domains to make contributions in AI and machine learning. Recent projects include developing a new model for educational assessment that brings together the strengths of machine learning and traditional statistical approaches; building and evaluating a chatbot to help students with math through automatically generated plots in addition to text; and exploring how adaptive experimentation methods can both meet researchers’ needs and be more beneficial for participants. Since coming to Carleton, she has published over 30 conference or journal publications and has co-organized workshops to bring together researchers in machine learning and education at several conferences.
Rafferty is chair of the Academic Standing Committee and part of the President’s Leadership Fellows Program. She has previously served on the Budget Committee, the STEM Board, and the Expanding Carleton’s Reach taskforce for the strategic planning initiative, among other services at Carleton. She was delighted to be the mentor for the FOCUS Class of 2028 cohort and taught the weekly colloquium for that group of first-year students.
Jeff Snyder ’97, Professor of Educational Studies
Professor Snyder joined the Carleton faculty in 2012 as an assistant professor in the educational studies department. Snyder teaches a range of courses, from Introduction to Educational Studies to the department’s capstone seminar, all of which have a strong emphasis on educational policy. He has taught the A&I seminar, Will This Be on the Test?: Standardized Testing and American Education, for more than a decade. His newest class, inspired by the dramatic rise of artificial intelligence tools, is titled, The Future is Now: Education and Technology in the 21st Century.
A Carleton alum, Snyder majored in psychology and minored in educational studies. He holds an EdM in learning and teaching from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a PhD in the history of education from New York University. Before pursuing graduate studies, he taught English to students of all ages and ability levels in the Czech Republic, France, China, India, Nepal, and the United States.
Snyder is a historian of education, whose work examines questions about race, national identity, and the purpose of public education in a diverse, democratic society. He is the author of Making Black History: The Color Line, Culture and Race in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Georgia Press 2018), which shows how the study and celebration of the Black past became a pillar of African American life during the Jim Crow era, intersecting with the development of segregated Black schools, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights movement. Snyder has also developed a keen interest in issues of academic freedom and free expression, especially as they relate to liberal arts education — see Professor Amna Khalid’s section for more details about their partnership on this topic.
Snyder chaired educational studies from 2019–2022, leading the department through a successful decennial review. He has served on the Faculty Personnel Committee, Off-Campus Studies Committee, and Junior Faculty Affairs Committee. He was also a member of the special Academic Freedom Task Force.
PROMOTIONS FOR FACULTY ON CONTINUING APPOINTMENT
Miaki Habuka
Promoted from Instructor in Japanese to Lecturer in Japanese.
Austin Mason, Director of Digital Arts and Humanities
Promoted from Lecturer in History to Senior Lecturer in History.
Matthew Olson, Director of Choral Activities
Promoted from Lecturer in Music and Voice to Senior Lecturer in Music and Voice.
