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Dr. Ronald L. Sharps is Associate Dean, College of the Arts, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ. He holds degrees in Art History (BA, University of Maryland), Arts Management (MA, American University), and American Studies (Ph.D., George Washington University). He has taught and lectured in American History and Art History, as well as in Arts Management and Arts Marketing. Through his various roles as an arts manager, he has worked with visual artists, musicians, dramatists, and dancers. Formerly, he served as program director of the National Office of for Black Catholics, and executive director of the Banneker Douglas Museum and of the African American Museums Association. He has served on numerous boards, committees, and grants review panels, e.g., president of the D.C. Chapter of the National Conference of Artists, member of the Maryland Tourism Development Board and the Historic Annapolis Foundation, and on-site evaluator and grants reviewer for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council on the Arts. While an administrator at MSU, he has served as a member of the Essex County Advisory Board of the Arts, the Advisory Committee of the Star-Ledger Scholarship in the Performing Arts, the Diversity and Cultural Inclusion Committee of the International Council of Fine Arts Deans, and the New Jersey Association of Black Educators.

In 2023, Dr. Sharps published Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality: African American Identity and Cultural Politics, 1893-1943 (Rowman and Littlefield), which examines the history of African American folklore and its legitimization of nine competing identities of the race. Between 2021 and 2023, he contributed extensive historical/cultural chronologies in three books examining black Catholic pursuit of faith and justice: The Fire This Time: A Black Catholic Sourcebook, Kim R. Harris, M. Roger Holland II, and Kate Williams, eds., (GIA Publications, 2023); Slavery and the Catholic Church in the United States: Historical Studies, David J. Endres, ed., (Catholic University of America Press, 2023); and Black Catholic Studies Reader: History and Theology, David J. Endres, ed. (The Catholic University of America, 2021). Sharps has also contributed to exhibition catalogs, e.g., “Confluence of Cultures in a Diverse America,” for the international exhibition, Confluence: Tradition in Contemporary Art, traveling between 2019 and 2022 from Montclair State University’s George Segal Gallery in New Jersey to the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, China, and concluding at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Specialization

American and African American Art and Cultural History. Arts Management.

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