54 Notable alumni of Earlham College

Harrison Estell Howe was an American chemist and chemical engineer. From 1919 to 1921 he was head of the Division of Research Extension of the National Research Council, and was for 21 years the editor of the journal Industrial and Engineering Chemistry. He was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the 1942 recipient of...

Chalmers Hadley was an American librarian and educator. Hadley served as librarian of Denver Public Library from 1911 to 1924 and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County from 1924 to 1945.

Martha Doan was an American chemist whose contributions include research in compounds of thallium, three published work, and tenure as a professor and dean at various institutions in the US. Throughout her lifetime, she received four degrees, a B.S. and master's from Purdue, a B.L. from Earlham College, and a Sc.D. from Cornell. She was a dean of women for...

Martin Brachall Bailey was an American politician and lawyer.

Flora Elizabeth Burchenal was an American educator and the first president of the American Folk Dance Society when it was founded in 1916. Journalist Ida Tarbell described Burchenal as "one of the 50 living women who have done the most for the welfare of the United States."

Eugene Sumner Mills was an American academic. He was the thirteenth President of the University of New Hampshire from 1974 to 1979. Mills attended Earlham College and Claremont Graduate University, earning a Ph.D. in psychology at the latter. He taught at Whittier College before coming to the University of New Hampshire. Mills was a member of the UNH faculty for...

Herman Brenner White is an American physicist who works at Fermilab. He won the 2010 American Physical Society Edward A Bouchet Award and became a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2025.

Charles Bateman Timberlake was a U.S. representative from Colorado.

William J. Lippert Jr., commonly known as Bill Lippert, is a former legislator and gay rights activist from the U.S. state of Vermont. He served 29 years in the Vermont House of Representatives as state representative of the Town of Hinesburg, from 1994 to 2022. He served as chair of the House Judiciary Committee for ten years, and then served...

Jonathan Clark Rogers was President of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens from 1949 until 1950.

Henry Underwood Johnson was an American lawyer and politician who served four terms as a U.S. representative from Indiana from 1891 to 1899.

Michael S. Seadle is an information scientist and historian. Until he retired he was a professor for digital libraries at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin. He was Chair of the iSchools from 2014 to 2016. In 2017 he became the Executive Director with a term until March 2020. In 2016 he became one...

Sara Gelser Blouin is an American politician from Oregon. She is a member of the Democratic Party.

Margaret Hill McCarter was an American teacher and novelist. She was the best-known and highest-paid novelist in Kansas at the time.

Raymond Smiley Springer was an American attorney and jurist who served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana from 1939 to 1947.

William Penn Nixon Sr. was an American publisher and politician from Indiana. Following an extensive private education, Nixon graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and became involved in Ohio politics. He served one partial and one full term in the Ohio House of Representatives, then retired from elected politics. He founded a newspaper in Cincinnati, then sold his share to...

Glenn Franklin Thistlethwaite was an American football, basketball, baseball, and track and field coach. He served as the head football coach at Illinois College (1908), Earlham College (1909–1912), Northwestern University (1922–1926), the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1927–1931), Carroll College—now known as Carroll University—in Waukesha, Wisconsin (1932–1933), and the University of Richmond (1934–1941), compiling a career college football record of 117–74–16. Coaching...

Greg Porter is a Democratic member of the Indiana House of Representatives, representing the 96th District since 1992. He is a member of the Indiana Black Legislative Caucus.

Thomas Clarkson Trueblood was an American professor of elocution and oratory and the first coach of the University of Michigan golf and debate teams. He was affiliated with the University of Michigan for 67 years from 1884 to 1951, and was a nationally known writer and speaker on oratory and debate. He founded UM's Department of Elocution and Oratory as...

Elephant Micah is a musical band or stage name of southern Indiana songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Joseph O'Connell. Recording mostly at home, O’Connell has produced an eclectic body of work since beginning the project in 2000. Elephant Micah's inconsistently available music has become a cult favorite among some lo-fi/indie and folk rock audiences.

Joseph Henry Kibbey was an American attorney who served as Associate Justice of the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court from 1889 to 1893 and Governor of Arizona Territory from 1905 to 1909. His legal career is most remembered for his efforts in the area of water law, his key legal contributions being the "Kibbey Decision", a legal ruling establishing the principle...

Maurice Manning is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry (with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Copper Canyon Press). He teaches English and Creative Writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he oversees the...

Jacob Piatt Dunn Jr. was an American historian, journalist, and author. A political writer and reformer, Dunn worked on ballot reform issues based on the Australian ballot system, authored a new Indianapolis city charter, and served as adviser to Indiana governor Thomas R. Marshall and U.S. Senator Samuel M. Ralston.

Olive Rush was a painter, illustrator, muralist, and an important pioneer in Native American art education. Her paintings are held in a number of private collections and museums, including: the Brooklyn Museum of New York City, the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Eva Lucille Feldman, M.D., Ph.D., is an American physician-scientist known for her work in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. She serves as the James W. Albers Distinguished University Professor of Neurology at the University of Michigan, as well as the Russell N. DeJong Professor of Neurology, Professor of Neurosurgery, and director of the NeuroNetwork for Emerging Therapies and ALS Center...

Harold Robert Aaron was a lieutenant general in the United States Army.

Richard Elihu Sloan was an American jurist and politician, who served as associate justice of the Arizona Territorial Supreme Court, a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Arizona and as the 17th and final Governor of Arizona Territory. As an Associate Justice he served for 16 years, the longest service of any...

David Worth Dennis II was an American attorney and Republican United States Representative from Indiana from 1969 to 1975.

Larry E. Overman is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. He was born in Chicago in 1943. Overman obtained a B.A. degree from Earlham College in 1965, and he completed his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969, under Howard Whitlock Jr. Professor Overman is a member of the United States National Academy...

Joel Haworth Elliott was a Union major during and after the Civil War. Joining as a private in August 1861, with Company C, 2nd Indiana Cavalry Regiment. He saw action at the Battle of Shiloh, Battle of Perryville, Battle of Stones River, and was wounded twice. Joel Elliott was killed during the Battle of Washita River (also called the Washita...

Luke H. Clippinger is an American politician and lawyer who has served as a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, representing the state's 46th district in Baltimore, since 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he has served as the speaker pro tempore of the Maryland House of Delegates since 2026.

Frederick Van Nuys was a United States senator from Indiana. Born in Falmouth, he attended the public schools and graduated from Earlham College (Richmond, Indiana) in 1898 and from Indiana Law School (now Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law) in 1900. He was admitted to the bar in 1900 and commenced practice in Shelbyville moving shortly afterward to...

John Porter East was an American politician, attorney, and academic. A member of the Republican Party, he served as a U.S. senator from North Carolina from 1981 to 1986.

Zack Exley is an American political and technology consultant.

David Grosso is an American attorney and politician. He is a former at-large member of the Council of the District of Columbia who lives in Brookland. A native Washingtonian, he graduated from Earlham College and Georgetown University Law Center. Grosso is a member of the D.C. Bar. Following the completion of his second term on the D.C. Council, he joined...

Warder Clyde "W.C." Allee was an American ecologist. He is recognized to be one of the great pioneers of American ecology. As an accomplished zoologist and ecologist, Allee was best known and recognized for his research on social behavior, aggregations and distributions of animals in aquatic as well as terrestrial environments. Allee attended Earlham College and upon his graduation in...

David Stefan Rovics is an American indie singer/songwriter. His music concerns both topical subjects such as the Iraq War, anti-globalization, anarchism, and social justice issues, and also labor history. Rovics has been an outspoken critic of former president George W. Bush, the Republican Party, John Kerry, and the Democratic Party.

Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago with a studio in Brooklyn. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience...

Frances Moore Lappé is an American researcher and author in the field of food and democracy policy. She is the author of 20 books including the 2.5-million-copy selling 1971 book Diet for a Small Planet, which the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History describes as "one of the most influential political tracts of the times." She has co-founded three organizations...

William Manning Marable was an American professor of public affairs, history and African-American Studies at Columbia University. He founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He wrote several texts and was active in numerous progressive political causes.

Peter Dain Suber is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP). Suber is known as a leading voice in the open access...

Zitkala-Ša, also Zitkála-Šá, was a Yankton Dakota writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist. She was also known by her anglicized and married name, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin. She wrote several works chronicling her struggles with cultural identity, and the pull between the majority culture in which she was educated, and the Dakota culture into which she was born and...

Don Wildman is a podcast and documentary host. He is the current host of the American History Hit podcast as well as the host and narrator of Mysteries at the Museum, Beyond the Unknown, Dark Tales with Don Wildman, and Buried Worlds with Don Wildman on the Travel Channel.

Andrew James Ginther is an American Democratic politician, the 53rd mayor of Columbus, Ohio. He has served since 2016. He previously served as President of Columbus City Council from 2011 until 2015.

Margaret Elaine Hamilton is an American computer scientist. She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Michael D. Shellenberger is an American author and journalist. He is the first endowed professor at the University of Austin, serving as CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech. Shellenberger is a prominent heterodox thinker on topics including climate change and homelessness. He also founded the online newsletter Public, which is the second largest Substack in news.

Robert Wolfe Quine was an American guitarist. A native of Akron, Ohio, Quine worked with a wide range of musicians, though he himself remained relatively unknown. Critic Mark Deming wrote that "Quine's eclectic style embraced influences from jazz, rock, and blues players of all stripes, and his thoughtful technique and uncompromising approach led to rewarding collaborations with a number of...

Harold Clayton Urey ForMemRS was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, as well as contributing to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.

Michael Carlyle Hall is an American actor and musician. He is best known for playing the role of the titular character in the Showtime series Dexter and David Fisher in the HBO drama series Six Feet Under. He won a Golden Globe Award for the former, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and received six total nominations for the Primetime Emmy...

Wendell Meredith Stanley was an American biochemist, virologist and Nobel laureate. Stanley's work contributed to lepracidal compounds, diphenyl stereochemistry, and the chemistry of the sterols. His research on the virus causing the mosaic disease in tobacco plants led to the isolation of a nucleoprotein which displayed tobacco mosaic virus activity.

Joseph Moore Dixon was an American Republican politician from Montana. He served as a U.S. representative, senator, and the seventh governor of Montana. A businessman and a modernizer of Quaker heritage, Dixon was a leader of the Progressive Movement in Montana and nationally. He was the national chairman for Theodore Roosevelt running for the presidency as the candidate of the...

J. Brent Bill is an American author of Quaker spiritual literature. He is a graduate of Wilmington College and Earlham School of Religion and has worked as a pastor and writing coach.

David Bruce Shear is an American diplomat who was a career Foreign Service Officer. Shear served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs from July 2014 to June 2016. Prior to his nomination for this position, he served as United States Ambassador to Vietnam. He was also formerly deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and...