Alison R. Byerly, Carleton’s 12th President
Alison Byerly is the twelfth president of Carleton College. She began her tenure in 2021, following eight years as president of Lafayette College, where she increased need-based financial aid, expanded the size of the student body, completed a $426M capital campaign, and oversaw the construction of a new science facility. She was previously a faculty member, provost, and executive vice president at Middlebury College for 24 years.
At Carleton, Byerly has led the development of Carleton 2033: The Liberal Arts in Action, a ten-year strategic direction focused on building an equitable community, championing the power of a broad liberal arts education, and expanding Carleton’s reach and impact. In 2024, she launched Sustainable Futures, a framework for sustainability, climate action, and environmental justice that advances the college’s leadership in emissions reduction while taking the bold step of dropping its carbon neutrality goal. Among other impacts of her presidency are her work with the Board of Trustees to divest the college’s endowment from fossil fuels and to end legacy admissions, as well as her steady leadership of the college community through the complex political environment of recent years.
A scholar of Victorian literature and culture, Byerly is the author of two scholarly books: Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Michigan, 2013) and Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge, 1998), and has written and spoken extensively on the role of technology in higher education. She teaches the course “Fictional Worlds” at Carleton, exploring what makes the imaginary worlds created by literature and other media feel real. A native of Pennsylvania, Byerly holds a B.A. with Honors in English from Wellesley College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.
A Leading Voice in Higher Education
A leading voice nationally on the value of a liberal arts education, emerging forms of digital scholarship, the changing role of the humanities in the digital age, the importance of curricular innovation, and MOOCs (massively open online courses), President Byerly frequently speaks with the media and has lectured widely on these topics. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.
Selected articles and interviews
“Can Donors Fill the Major Budget Holes That Colleges Face Under Trump?” The New York Times, June 28, 2025.
“Harvard isn’t the only prestigious university that is navigating difficult waters with the current administration.” Minnesota Public Radio, June 3, 2025.
“Minnesota universities and colleges weather chaotic changes in Trump’s first 100 days in office.” The Star Tribune, April 28, 2025.
“Trump is bullying, blackmailing and threatening colleges, and they are just beginning to fight back.” The Hechinger Report, April 17, 2025.
“Why the college endowment tax doesn’t make the grade.” The Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2025.
“US universities are struggling to increase diversity. Are legacy admissions part of the problem?” The Guardian, Oct. 27, 2024.
“Dr. Matt Hillmann and Carleton College President Dr. Alison Byerly discuss Carleton College’s pledged donation for high school renovations.” KYMN, Sept. 24, 2024.
“What college presidents are really thinking.” Politico, Sept. 9, 2024.
“Carleton College President reflects on admitting students after SCOTUS decision.” WBUR, March 15, 2024.
“‘This is about the message it sends’: Carleton College ends legacy admissions.” Minnesota Public Radio, Sept. 6, 2023.
“Will court ruling undo diversity progress at Minnesota’s most selective colleges?” The Star Tribune, Aug. 12, 2023.
“Even University Presidents Lose Their Minds When Their Teens Apply to College.” The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 29, 2022.
Scholarly Works
Alison Byerly is the author of two books, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism, published in 2012 by the University of Michigan Press, and Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature, published by Cambridge University Press in 1997 and reissued in paperback in 2006.
Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism connects the Victorian fascination with “virtual travel” with the rise of realism in 19th-century fiction and 21st-century experiments in virtual reality. Even as the expansion of river and railway networks in the 19th century made travel easier than ever before, staying at home and fantasizing about travel turned into a favorite pastime. New ways of representing place—360-degree panoramas, foldout river maps, exhaustive railway guides—offered themselves as substitutes for actual travel. Thinking of these representations as a form of “virtual travel” reveals a surprising continuity between the Victorian fascination with imaginative dislocation and 21st-century efforts to use digital technology to expand the physical boundaries of the self.
“Railway carriages are likened to chat rooms, balloonists encounter a ‘SimCity’ view of the metropolis, and the associative yet disconnected episodes of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat resemble ‘links in a blog.’… Byerly’s wide-ranging and strenuously researched survey.. stakes out an intriguing basis from which to analyze the ‘indeterminacy’ inherent in the realist project.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Byerly’s study is ambitious, original, and insightful…and it is testament to its stimulating thesis and rich cultural and historical scope that it deserves to be taken up, elaborated, and questioned by scholars from within nineteenth-century literary studies and well beyond.”
— Nineteenth-Century Literature
“Are We There Yet? helps us to imagine some of the destinations we could reach by aligning old literary problems with new contexts as well as with our own new media forms.”
— Studies in the Novel
Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the representation of a variety of arts–primarily painting, theater, and music–within the work of major nineteenth-century novelists. It charts a historical progression, from Romantic poetry, through mid-century Realism, to Aestheticism, showing how authors used references to other forms of art to illuminate their own aesthetic ideals. Examining the aesthetic theory and cultural practice of different arts, Byerly demonstrates the importance of artistic representation to the development of Victorian Realism.
“Alison Byerly’s rich, stimulating, wide-ranging, and admirably compact new book raises a provocative set of questions.”
— Australasian Victorian Studies Journal
“… a persuasive, thoroughly readable, and well-constructed book.”
— Jennifer Green-Lewis, Victorian Studies
Selected Articles and Presentations
“Media.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 46 (3-4), 759-763. Fall/Winter 2018. doi:10.1017/S1060150318000761
“Victorian STEAM to Digital Humanities: Mediations of Art and Technology.” Keynote Address, Victorian STEAM: Victorians Institute Conference 2016. North Carolina State University, October 2016.
“Liberal Education in the Modern University,” panel presentation, Does Liberal Education Need Saving? Annual Weissbourd Conference at the University of Chicago, May 2016.
“Virtuality and Presence: Victorian Media and the Attenuation of the Self.” Invited lecture, Oxford University, January 2015.
“Are We There Yet?” Invited lecture in conjunction with Gibson/Martelli’s virtual reality exhibition ‘80° N’, QUAD Gallery, Derby, January 2015.
“Technologies of Travel in the Victorian Novel,” Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, ed. Lisa Rodensky (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 289-311. Doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199533145.013.0015
“Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism.” Invited lecture, Harvard Humanities Center, March 2013.
“Everything Old is New Again: The Digital Past and the Humanistic Future.” Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, Seattle, January 2012. http://web.duke.edu/~ves4/mla2012/Byerly-DigitalPast-HumanisticFuture.pdf
“’A Prodigious Map Beneath His Feet’: Virtual Travel and the Panoramic Perspective,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts Vol. 29, Numbers 2-3 (June/September 2007): 151-69. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08905490701584643
“Rivers, Journeys, and the Construction of Place in Nineteenth-Century English Literature,” in Steven Rosendale, ed., The Greening of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and the Environment. (Iowa University Press, 2002): 77-94.
“Effortless Art: The Sketch in Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature,” Criticism 41, 3 (Summer 1999): 349-64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23124216
“The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Harold Fromm and Cheryll Glotfelty. (University of Georgia Press, 1996). http://goo.gl/CgJSV
“‘The Language of the Soul’: George Eliot and Music,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, June 1989: 1-17. http://www.jstor.org/pss/3045104