Ronald A. Sharp, Acting President and John Crowe Ransom Professor of English at Kenyon College, has been named Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English at Vassar College, effective July 1, 2003.

Ronald A. Sharp, Acting President and John Crowe Ransom Professor of English at Kenyon College, has been named Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English at Vassar College, effective July 1, 2003.

"Ron is an outstanding scholar with a breadth of teaching, research, and administrative experience. He will bring a rich and varied background to the College. I could not be more pleased with the appointment," said Vassar President Frances D. Fergusson.

"I am thrilled about coming to Vassar, which I have long considered one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country. It is a great honor to be appointed Dean of such a distinguished and dedicated faculty," Sharp said. "I eagerly look forward to working with all my new colleagues at Vassar: faculty, administration, students, and staff."

Sharp joined the Kenyon faculty in 1970 and assumed the Ransom Chair in 1990. He was appointed Acting President at Kenyon in July of 2002 and had served as Provost at Kenyon from February 2000 until June 2002. He was Acting Provost from July of 1999 until February 2000 and Associate Provost from July 1998 to July 1999.

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 nineteenth-century English poet John Keats, he served as an organizer of and participant in the 1995 celebration at Harvard University of the bicentennial of the Romantic poet's birth. It was the first major Keats research conference and was attended by almost three hundred Keats biographers, scholars, critics, teachers, and poets from all over the world.

In 1978, Sharp and Frederick Turner, then a fellow member of Kenyon College's English faculty, resurrected The Kenyon Review, the College's renowned literary magazine, which had ceased publication several years earlier. For the next four years, the two served as coeditors of the Review and restored it to health. Sharp's work with the Review, his scholarship, and his interest in working with high-school teachers have won him fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center.

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, who became a close friend, he edited The Norton Book of Friendship. His current projects include writing a book on Keats and friendship, writing an essay on the implications for liberal education of the acceleration of time, and doing interviews for "The Paris Review."

A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Sharp is married to Inese B. Sharp, codirector of Kenyon's Brown Family Environmental Center. They have two sons, Andrew, a College of Wooster graduate who is a development officer at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, and James, a sophomore at the College of Wooster.

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Vassar College is a highly selective, coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.

This article was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2003.