William Chapman Sharpe^[1] is an American literary scholar. He is a professor of English at Barnard College, Columbia University.^[2]

Biography

Sharpe received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University and M.A. from the University of Oxford.^[2] He joined the faculty of Barnard College in 1983, and his scholarship focuses on the art, culture, and literature of the modern cities, especially New York City.^[1][3] He has written about subjects such as shadows or nighttime environments of cities as depicted in literature and arts as well as a cultural history on walking.^[4][5]

Sharpe received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993.^[6]

Works

Author

• Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
• New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Art, Literature, and Photography (Princeton University Press, 2008) ISBN 0691133247
• Grasping Shadows: The Dark Side  of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film (Oxford University Press, 2017) ISBN 0190675276
• The Art of Walking: A History in 100 Images (Yale University Press, 2023) ISBN 0300266847

Editor

• The Longman Anthology of British Literature, General Editor David Damrosch, "The Victorian Age", ed. William C. Sharpe and Heather Henderson (Longman, 1999) ISBN 0205655262