Professor

Office: 114B Leonard Hall
Phone: 724-357-3965
Email: rshafer@iup.edu

Education

Ph.D., Duquesne University, 1975

Bio, Including Academic Interests and Awards

A specialist in British literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, Professor Ronald G. Shafer is a senior member of the doctoral English faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). He has published widely in works of this period, especially Shakespeare, Milton, and the Metaphysical Poets, and offered numerous presentations at regional, national, and international conferences. His two collections of essays, one on Shakespeare and the other on Milton, have been widely received and positively reviewed in leading journals. Currently, he is completing his 34th year in IUP’s Department of English.

More recently, he has produced, written and co-directed videotape documentaries on some of America’s leading authors – Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, poets Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, and novelist John Updike. Founder and continuing president of The Friends of Milton’s Cottage, he was coordinator of the International Milton Symposia (1981 and 1983) and executive director of the 15th World Congress of Poets (1997), held in England. He serves on the Trustees of the Milton Cottage Museum, is Honorary President of the Japan Milton Society, has been a member of the Board of Directors of the College English Association, and presided over the Pennsylvania College English Association. He has twice turned down nomination for the executive directorship of the national College English Association.

Shafer has been the recipient of a number of national awards – Silver Medalist in the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education’s National Professor-of-the-Year Award, Exemplary Teaching Excellence Award by the American Association for Higher Education, and one of fifty professors cited by Change Magazine for creative faculty leadership at the national level. He has also served as a Master Teacher for two National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Shakespeare Institutes and taught, as IUP’s first Fulbright recipient, in Egypt for an academic year on a senior Fulbright visiting professorship. Professor Shafer is a lifetime distinguished University Professor at IUP and has also received its President’s Medal of Distinction.

He has guest-lectured, keynoted, or taught abroad in numerous countries including Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Germany, Austria, England, and France. Most recently, he offered the invited keynote at a prestigious international conference in Cairo. Also, he helped facilitate an IUP linkage with Egypt and continues to direct numerous Egyptian professors’ dissertations. Locally, he played a major role in bringing to the area celebrity-status figures, including English poet Stephen Spender, American novelist John Updike, British film star Michael York, and the New York Times best-selling author, Madame Nien Cheng. A lifelong resident of Armstrong County, Shafer continues to lecture extensively in the area.