Career
The announcement was made on January 16, 2013. She assumed the position on July 1, 2013 and became the 17th President of Lafayette College and the first female President in the college"s history. Previously, 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 speciality 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;" Doctor 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 is a leading voice 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). 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, forthcoming 2012).
Doctor Byerly is a native of Glenside, Pennsylvania in Montgomery County. She was born in 1961.
Byerly is married to Stephen Jensen, a medical editors
She likes to sing, play the flute, and ski.
