About Steven Knapp
Dr. Steven Knapp became the 16th president of The George Washington University on Aug.1, 2007. Knapp came to GW with nearly 30 years of higher education experience, serving most recently as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at The Johns Hopkins University.
Knapp joined Johns Hopkins University in 1994 as dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and has served as provost since 1996. As chief academic officer, Knapp coordinated the work of the eight Hopkins schools and developed strategies for regional, national, and international growth. He was actively engaged in fund raising, including an ongoing $3.2-billion capital campaign, and, in 1994, he launched a capital campaign for Arts and Sciences that eventually yielded $230 million and a named benefactor for the school.
Knapp also served for 10 years as Johns Hopkins’ representative to the Maryland Independent Colleges and Universities Association Board of Trustees and frequently testified before the Maryland General Assembly. Knapp currently serves on the Maryland Governor’s Advisory Committee on Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute board of directors, and he is chair of JHPIEGO Corporation. In addition, Knapp has been involved in the strategic planning and lobbying efforts of the Association of American Universities and has directed international initiatives including Johns Hopkins’ expansion of its institutional presence in Italy, China, and Singapore.
His leadership accomplishments at Johns Hopkins include the establishment of a university-wide equal opportunity and affirmative action office, a new fund for “target of opportunity” professorships, an undergraduate degree in neuroscience, the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute, the addition of an international research institute to the university’s campus in Nanjing, China, and a $20-million student arts center. Also, along with Johns Hopkins President William R. Brody, he established a Commission on Undergraduate Education that resulted in significant new initiatives in the areas of student life and diversity.
While at Hopkins, Knapp expanded the position of provost and assigned a special priority to the university’s role in the Baltimore region and, more widely, in the national and international communities. He organized an Urban Health Council to develop an effective university and health system response to public health problems in inner-city Baltimore, which resulted in the creation of the Urban Health Institute. During his tenure, Hopkins created a director of city relations in its office of government affairs to address town-gown issues, including safety and student behavior, and Knapp has been engaged with the city of Baltimore on a wide range of issues.
A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century English literature and literary theory, Knapp has published Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge and Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism. He also has written and co-authored articles that have appeared in numerous scholarly journals as well as in several books. Knapp joined Johns Hopkins after 16 years on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held leadership positions in the Department of English and on university committees.
Knapp earned his doctorate from Cornell University in 1981 after receiving a master’s degree there in 1977 and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1973. He and his wife, Diane, have a farm in Sparks, Md. They have two adult children, Jesse and Sarah.
