Carleton announces Winter 2025 faculty promotions

Five members of the Carleton faculty have been awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor. The promotions were approved by the Board of Trustees at its February meeting and take effect September 1, 2025.

Meet the newly promoted faculty members:

Sonja Anderson, assistant professor of religion

Professor Anderson arrived at Carleton in 2016 as a visiting professor and then began a tenure track position as assistant professor in 2017. She earned her BA in religious studies from University of California–Los Angeles, her MA in religious studies from University of Notre Dame, and her PhD in religious studies from Yale University. Prior to arriving at Carleton, she taught Greek at the Yale Divinity School and Yale College, and was a McDougall Teaching Fellow at the Yale Center for Teaching and Learning. Her teaching includes courses in early Christianity and ancient Judaism, as well as courses on medicine and healing, gender and the Catholic Church, mysticism and monasticism, and apocalyptic movements. Her classes center student discussion, and she builds an inclusive classroom through carefully designed pedagogy and lively conversation. Anderson studies early Christianity. Her book, Idol Talk: False Worship in the Early Christian World, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025. Noting her facility with a wide array of languages, including Greek (both classical and Byzantine), Latin, Hebrew, and Syriac, external reviewers praise her ability to make connections between ancient and contemporary entanglements of religion and politics. She has served on Carleton’s College Council and on the Education and Curriculum Committee, and has shown great dedication to her work advising students. She has been a mentor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship and regularly attends TRIO events supporting first generation and low-income students.

Summer Forester, assistant professor of political science

Professor Forester joined the Carleton faculty in 2019. She earned her BS in hospitality and tourism management from the University of West Florida, her MA in government and justice studies from Appalachian State University, and her PhD in political science from Purdue University, where she studied security threats in the Middle East with a focus on women’s rights. Forester has taught an array of courses across the political science curriculum at Carleton, from an introductory course on international relations and world politics, to an advanced course on Middle East politics, to an upper-level seminar on global gender politics. She uses the everyday as a critical site of inquiry to examine how international security politics inform lived experience. She is intentional about creating educational spaces that reinforce Carleton’s mission of cultivating responsible global citizens. Forester’s research explores three complementary avenues of inquiry: feminist security studies and women’s movements in the Middle East and North Africa; tracking feminist mobilization through the creation of a database of domestic and transnational feminist activism; and whether and how state-based structures called gender equality machines (GEMs) function as vectors of democratic advancement in authoritarian contexts. She is at the forefront of research in this area and her next project focuses on GEMs in Jordan. Forester is an elected member of the Faculty Affairs Committee at Carleton and continues to serve as the political science department career advisor.

Andrea Mazzariello, assistant professor of music

Professor Mazzariello joined Carleton’s music department first as a visiting assistant professor from 2015 to 2018, and then as a tenure track assistant professor. He earned his BA in music and English, magna cum laude, from Williams College in 2000; his MM in composition from the University of Michigan in 2002; and his MFA in 2008 and PhD in 2011, both in composition, from Princeton University. Mazzariello teaches a wide range of courses at Carleton, including Electronic Music Composition, Computer Music and Sound, Materials of Music, Composition Studio, and Introduction to Music Technology, while also teaching private lessons in composition. His musical and pedagogical versatility are also evident in his comps advising, which oversees student projects in a range of musical forms. Mazzariello’s research and artistic work are in the fields of contemporary music, with a focus on percussion, minimalist aesthetics, live electronic sound, live video, popular music, and improvisation. He has been commissioned by leading contemporary music ensembles to compose numerous pieces for percussion, voice, electronics, organ, clarinet, and more, and regularly produces and performs in commercial recordings and albums, on keyboard, drum set, voice, and electronics. At Carleton, Mazzariello has served as chair of the Junior Faculty Affairs Committee, a member of the Academic Freedom Task Force, and is currently on College Council. In the music department, he oversees the music-related hardware and software for labs and classrooms, and has brought major composers, musicians, and ensembles to campus through his role as coordinator of the Light Lectureship.

Meredith McCoy, assistant professor of American studies and history

Professor McCoy joined Carleton’s faculty in 2019, teaching courses across history and American studies. She earned BAs in anthropology and music with a minor in Native American studies from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in 2010. She then completed an MEd in teaching, learning and leading from Lipscomb University in 2011, while she taught in tuition-free, public charter schools in Nashville and Atlanta that were part of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) network. In addition to being a public school teacher, McCoy was an American Indian studies specialist and program instructor at Duke University as part of the John Hope Franklin Young Scholars Program (2014–2017), a policy assistant at the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education (2015), and an instructor at Turtle Mountain Community College (2018) and Freedom University (2019). In 2019, she earned her PhD in American studies from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. In Carleton’s history department, McCoy teaches introductory and advanced courses in Indigenous histories. In American studies, she teaches courses about Indigenous research methods. In all her courses, she emphasizes a pedagogical practice that foregrounds care and aligns with the “4 R’s” of respect, responsibility, relationships, and redistribution. As an interdisciplinary scholar, McCoy’s research bridges history, American studies, Indigenous studies, and education studies. Her work narrates complex histories of education funding and policy that center Indigenous creativity and strategy, with much of it categorized as public scholarship. McCoy serves on the Carleton Arboretum Committee and the Indigenous Peoples Advisor Committee, while supporting Carleton’s Indigenous students as an informal mentor to the Indigenous Peoples Alliance.

Jacob Morton, assistant professor of classics

Professor Morton arrived at Carleton in 2018. He earned his BA in Latin from the University of Montana, his MA from the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Colorado, and his PhD from the Department of Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania. Morton teaches a wide array of courses at Carleton, including Greek and Latin language courses, Greek and Roman history courses, and various thematic courses such as Experimental Archaeology and Experiential History. Morton conducts research in three distinct fields: ancient Greek religion, experimental archaeology, and Roman history. In an article published in the American Journal of Archaeology, he and his collaborators argue that the Linear B tablets describe items used in a ritual sacrifice, in contrast to previously held beliefs. Other work by Morton includes several articles published in the EXARC Journal, including one stemming from his Experimental Archaeology course at Carleton, and another where he recreates food dishes from over 2,000 years ago, which was widely praised. At Carleton, Morton has demonstrated a strong commitment to service at the College and beyond. He served as president of the Junior Faculty Affairs Committee and has worked closely with a number of junior faculty at the College in that role.