William Chapman Sharpe

Professor William Chapman Sharpe specializes in the literature, art, and culture of the modern city, particularly New York. He teaches courses in Victorian and Modern literature, as well as literary theory. Professor Sharpe's current research explores the cultural history of walking and the emergence of walking as an artistic practice since the 1960s. He teaches an interdisciplinary course called "Walk This Way" that looks at pedestrian milestones from ancient Greek peripatetic philosophers to contemporary performance art. His book The Art of Walking: A History in 100 Images, was published by Yale University Press in 2023. 

Professor Sharpe’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published numerous essays on literature, urban studies, and the visual arts.

In 2018 he was Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. During the 2019-2020 academic year he was a Fellow with the Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Columbia University Global Center in Paris, where he again did research in 2022-2023.

Professor Sharpe's book on images of New York City at night, New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Art, Literature, and Photography (Princeton University Press, 2008), is the winner of the Peter S. Rollins Award of the Northeast American Studies Association and the MSA Book Prize of the Modernist Studies Association.

His book Grasping Shadows: The Dark Side of Literature, Painting, Photography, and Film (Oxford University Press, 2017), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. The book analyzes dozens of artistic shadows in images and texts, proposing a method for understanding how shadows function in all artistic media, from Plato to Picasso to pop songs, films, installations, street art, and advertising.  

He is co-editor of "The Victorian Age," volume 2B of The Longman Anthology of British Literature.

His other books include Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Visions of the Modern City: Essays on Art, Literature, and History, edited with Leonard Wallock (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); and The Passing of Arthur: Essays on Loss and Renewal in Arthurian Tradition, edited with Christopher Baswell (Garland Publishing, 1986).