Vassar College Department of English

Faculty

Ronald Sharp is Professor of English at Vassar College, where he was Dean of the Faculty from 2003 to 2008. Before he came to Vassar he was Acting President, John Crowe Ransom Professor of English, and Provost of Kenyon College, where he was also Editor of The Kenyon Review. His special interests include nineteenth-century British literature, contemporary poetry, Australian literature, Romanticism, and the literature of friendship.

Sharp 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 late novelist and short-story writer Eudora Welty, he edited The Norton Book of Friendship.

His articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as New Literary History, Paris Review, New England Review, Australian Literary Review, American Literature, Modern Philology, English Language Notes, TriQuarterly, Keats-Shelley Journal, and The Wordsworth Circle.

A graduate of Kalamazoo College, Sharp holds a master’s degree from the University of Michigan and a doctorate from the University of Virginia. He is the recipient of fellowships from various foundations, including the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the National Humanities Center.