Ronald A. Sharp USA

Ronald A. Sharp is Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English at Vassar College. Before he went to Vassar in July 2003 he was Acting President, John Crowe Ransom Professor of English, and Provost of Kenyon College.

A graduate of Kalamazoo College, he holds a master's degree from the University of Michigan and a doctorate from the University of Virginia. An expert on the work of the poet John Keats, he co-directed the 1995 celebration at Harvard University of the bicentennial of the Romantic poet's birth.

In 1978, Ronald Sharp resurrected The Kenyon Review, the College's renowned literary magazine, which had ceased publication several years earlier and for the next four years, served as its co-editor. He is the recipient of various fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and other foundations.
He is the author or editor of six books, including Keats, Skepticism, and the Religion of Beauty; Friendship and Literature: Spirit and Form; Reading George Steiner (with Nathan A. Scott, Jr.); The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on John Keats (with Robert M. Ryan); and Selected Poems of Michael S. Harper. With the novelist and short-story writer Eudora Welty, who became a close friend, he edited The Norton Book of Friendship.

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Ronald Sharp is married and has two sons.

(2003)