Four Carleton professors appointed to endowed chairs

Effective September 1, four professors were appointed to endowed chairs at Carleton. These endowed chairs provide recognition and support for superb educators who help sustain Carleton’s tradition of teaching excellence.

Learn more about the professors:

W.I. and Hulda F. Daniell Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies

Stacy Beckwith is the W.I. and Hulda F. Daniell Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She earned her PhD in comparative literature from the University of Minnesota in 1997 after receiving a BA in international relations and Hebrew from the University of Toronto. She completed research for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Tel Aviv with the support of a Fulbright fellowship. Since 2008, Beckwith has been the director of Carleton’s Judaic Studies Program. After helping to bring Arabic to Carleton, she helped create the Department of Middle Eastern Languages in 2010, and then co-led the creation of the Middle East studies minor. Beckwith teaches Hebrew language courses from elementary through intermediate, as well as courses in translation on Israeli and Palestinian literature and film, and on broader Jewish history through collective memory. She primarily researches how medieval and early modern Iberian Jews and Catholic converts appear in historical fiction written in Spain today. Her edited volume, Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain (2000), examines modern Jewish, Arab, and Hispanic memories of multicultural Iberia, as expressed in ongoing traditions of music, poetry, prayer, architecture, and name giving. Beckwith has also published in such volumes as Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish Literatures (Routledge 2006); Sephardism: Jewish Spanish History in the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press 2012); and Spain, the Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation (University of Toronto Press 2020). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled, Inquisition, Pueblo, Plot: Spain’s Old Jewish Quarter Novels.

Beckwith is the co-founder of the international working group Genealogías de Sefarad, or Genealogies of Sepharad (historic Jewish Spain) which includes scholars, authors, and Sephardic (Spanish Jewish) descendants from the United States, Canada, Spain, and Israel. Following symposia since 2015 in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, the group continues to focus on how Spain today engages with medieval and early modern Iberian Jews through historical fiction, art, music, theater, film, tourism, commerce, and the preservation of once-Jewish spaces in the old sections of Spanish towns and cities. Also included in the group’s focus are Jews in Spain today and the country’s modern and contemporary connections with the Sephardic diaspora around the Mediterranean, in Northern Europe, and in the Americas.

Beckwith’s Carleton service includes membership on the Faculty Personnel Committee, the Global Engagement Initiative Committee, the Education and Curriculum Committee, College Council, the Faculty Grants Committee, the Advisory Committee on Student Life, and the Humanities Center Advisory Board. She has also been a Posse mentor. This summer, she worked with her colleagues in Middle East studies to prepare a gateway course for the program’s minor.

Class of 1941 Professor of English and the Liberal Arts

Nancy Cho is the Class of 1941 Professor of English and the Liberal Arts. She joined the Carleton faculty in 1995 as assistant professor of English and was promoted to full professor in 2009. She earned her BA in English from Yale and her PhD in English from the University of Michigan. She teaches and writes on nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, Asian American literature, and contemporary multicultural drama. She seeks to understand how literature intersects with history, culture, and politics, particularly in the twentieth century United States. Most of her courses explicitly engage a comparative approach to American identity and draw students from a range of majors. Recent courses include: Introduction to American Studies, The City in American Literature, Playwrights of Color: Taking the Stage, Dissenting Americans, and Literary Revision: Authority, Art, and Rebellion. In Winter 2025, Cho will lead the off-campus studies program, Living London: Literature, Performance, Culture.

Cho’s research focuses on Asian American literature and on the work of playwrights of color during and after the Civil Rights movement. Her published articles examine the plays and performances of writers such as Lorraine Hansberry, Philip Kan Gotanda, Chay Yew, and Anna Deavere Smith. She is currently working on a book manuscript about Hisaye Yamamoto, the pioneering Japanese American short story writer and journalist who was imprisoned at the Poston, Arizona internment camp from 1942 to 1945.

At Carleton, Cho has most recently served as a member of the Humanities Center Advisory Board and the Arts and Exhibitions Committee. She has previously served as both chair and associate chair of the English department, director and associate director of American studies, co-chair of the Student Fellowships Committee, and co-chair of CEDI (Community, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). Since her arrival at Carleton, Cho has been actively committed to the development of Asian American studies within the curriculum and to diversity issues and access for underrepresented students. She has mentored students under the Posse Foundation, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and ACM Minority Scholars programs.

Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of Economics and the Liberal Arts

Nathan D. Grawe is the Lloyd P. Johnson-Norwest Professor of Economics and the Liberal Arts. He has served on the Carleton faculty since 1999. From 2015 to 2022, he was Ada M. Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Social Sciences. As a labor economist, Grawe studies the connections between family background and educational and labor market outcomes. His oft-cited book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press 2018), examines how recent demographic shifts are likely to affect demand for higher education. In a follow-up project, The Agile College (Johns Hopkins University Press 2021), Grawe draws on interviews with higher education leaders to provide examples of how proactive institutions are grappling with demographic change.

Grawe has participated in the leadership of Carleton’s Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge (QuIRK) initiative and has shared what Carleton has learned through this initiative at invited talks and professional development workshops at dozens of colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. Since 2015, he has served as senior editor of Numeracy, the flagship journal of the National Numeracy Network. In 2018, he took on the role of the journal’s executive editor.

During his time at Carleton, Grawe’s campus involvement has included work on the Strategic Planning Coordinating Committee, Budget Committee, Facilities Master Planning Committee, Junior Faculty Affairs Committee, Faculty Council, and as the Accreditation Sub-Committee team lead for “Teaching and Learning: Evaluation and Improvement.” In addition to his committee work, he has been an instructor for the Summer Writing Program, Summer Quantitative Reasoning Institute, and the Summer Teaching Institute. Grawe served as associate dean of the College from 2009 to 2012 and chair of economics from 2014 to 2017.

Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of History and the Liberal Arts

Serena Zabin is the Stephen R. Lewis, Jr. Professor of History and the Liberal Arts. She earned a PhD in early American history from Rutgers University–New Brunswick in 2000, after receiving an MA in Latin from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in 1993 and a BA in classics (summa cum laude) from Bowdoin College in 1991. She came to Carleton in 2000 as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, was hired for a tenure-track position in 2002, and was promoted to full professor in 2015.

Zabin has written several books on early American history and gender and women’s history. In 2020, she published an award-winning book on the origins of the American Revolution, The Boston Massacre: A Family History. The book focuses on the extensive personal interactions between troops, their families, and townspeople, challenging the traditional narrative of the “massacre” that created its iconic place in the history leading to the American Revolution. Zabin was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship to support completion of the book.

Zabin has also engaged students in her research, collaborating with Carls using digital tools to map the personal networks in colonial Boston that help explain the events of the 1770 shootings. She and her students have worked closely with historians from the Old State House Museum in Boston to develop materials to educate museum patrons, including digital maps, a podcast, and even a draft of a computer game, Witness to the Revolution. Zabin’s deep interest in public history is reflected in her teaching, for which she regularly engages students in civic engagement projects to enhance how the public learns and thinks about history. Earlier this year, Zabin was awarded the Robert C. Ritchie Distinguished Fellowship in Early American History at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California. This nine-month residential fellowship will support her new research project, American Affections: The Life of Mary Fish Noyes Silliman Dickinson, 1736–1818.