Alison Byerly

Alison R. Byerly became the 17th president of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania on July 1, 2013.

Byerly was born in Glenside, Pennsylvania in Montgomery County in 1961. She earned a bachelor of arts degree with honors in English at Wellesley College in 1983, a master of arts in English at the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, and a doctorate in English from Penn in 1989 where she was awarded a University Fellowship, the Dean's Fellowship, Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching, and Mellon Dissertation Fellowship. At Wellesley, she was awarded Wellesley's Jacqueline Award in English Composition and Mary C. Lyons Prize in Writing.

Byerly became president of Lafayette College in 2013 and in 2016 launched a 10-year plan to increase the student body by 16 percent, more than double the financial aid budget, and create 40 new faculty positions with a goal of allowing Lafayette to admit more students without regard for their ability to pay. By 2019, the aid budget had grown by 30 percent, the student body by 100 students, and the faculty by 11 positions. Under Byerly's leadership, Lafayette also launched and completed its largest-ever fund-raising effort, and opened its largest capital project ever, the Rockwell Integrated Sciences Center.

Before joining Lafayette, Byerly served as provost and executive Vice President at Middlebury College in Vermont from 2007 to 2012. She had been at Middlebury College since 1989. She has been a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Oxford University.

Her area of specialty is the intersection of literature and other media with research focus on Victorian Literature, culture and media; digital humanities; technology and the liberal arts. In the announcement from Lafayette, they stated that "she is one of the nation’s most prominent thought leaders on the role of technology in higher education today;" Byerly commented “At a time when many liberal arts colleges are looking for ways to extend their reach further into the world of technology and to connect the traditional liberal arts disciplines with opportunities to pursue more project-based, hands-on modes of inquiry, Lafayette is well positioned to lead in these initiatives,” She has written and lectured on 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).

Byerly is married to Stephen Jensen, a medical editor. They have a daughter and a son.

She has written Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge, 1998), and Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (U of Michigan, 2012).