Sharon M. Meagher is Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty at Marymount Manhattan College, a role she began in July 2017.  Meagher serves as the Chief Academic Officer of the College.  She is responsible for the curriculum, assessment and accreditation, faculty, institutional research, academic budget, advising, and retention.  She co-chairs the Enrollment Leadership Team, the Institutional Effectiveness and Planning Committee, and serves on the College's Budget Committee. She also is a member of the President's Cabinet.  

Prior to that, she served as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Professor of Humanities at Widener University in Chester, PA.  She served a co-PI for a major grant (with Devon Walls) awarded by the Barra Foundation for the development of collaborative creative-place making strategies in the city of Chester, entitled Boundaries and Bridges.  In that role, Meagher facilitated a number of multi-disciplinary collaborative projects that involve Widener faculty and students and partners in the greater Chester community. 

Meagher’s recent teaching and research focuses on interdisciplinary connections in three areas:   1) philosophy and the city; 2) feminist theory and women and development in the global South; 3) university social responsibility and civic engagement.  What integrates these studies is a focus on ethics, public policy and social justice. 

From 1999-2001, Meagher worked as Director of Education at The Union Institute's Office for Social Responsibility in Washington, DC, an academically based public policy center. There she worked on issues concerning university social responsibility, nonprofit organizations and democratic values, and women's issues.  From 1989-2014 (on leave 1999-2001), Meagher was a faculty member at the University of Scranton in Scranton, PA; she served as a professor of philosophy and also served as founding chair of the Department of Latin American Studies and Women’s Studies.  Meagher was active in the Scranton community, serving as the founding president of Mulberry Central Neighborhood Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to coordinating services and development activities in the city's hill section. 

Meagher has been involved in creative place-making activities in Scranton and in Chester.  Working collaboratively with theater artists Hank Willenbrink and Aaron Landsman, they developed the Our City project in Scranton.  More recently, Meagher served on the core team of Chester Made, a project that utilized storytelling and performance to do participatory urban planning for a Culture and Arts corridor in Chester, PA.

As an advocate for the public relevance of philosophy and the humanities more generally, Meagher served on the board of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and was a founding member of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Public Philosophy.  Meagher is the co-founder and co-chair of the Public Philosophy Network, an international organization founded in 2010 that now boasts more than 1,000 members and offers workshops, resource sharing, and opportunities to network and collaborate on engaged teaching and research projects.  

Meagher is the author of articles on philosophy of the city, urban geography, feminist theory and practice, and ethics.  She is the editor of two books, a feminist analyses of public policy (Women and Children First, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005) (co-edited with Patrice DiQuinzio) and Philosophy and the City:  Classic to Contemporary Writings (Albany:  SUNY Press, 2008).  She is completing a monograph on the relationship between Western philosophy and the city entitled Philosophical Streetwalking:  Grounding Philosophy and the City and editing a Handbook on Philosophy of the City for Routledge.  She serves on the editorial board of the journal CITY.

Although Meagher does not teach as often as she used to, she still teaches courses on urban issues and feminist theory and sustainable development.  She served as the co-facilitator of The University of Scranton’s faculty sustainability workshop, a project that assists faculty in integrating sustainability issues in courses across the curriculum and initiated such a project at Widener.

Meagher also served as a curriculum consultant and faculty member for the master’s degree program on Gender, Culture, and Development at the Kigali Institute of Education in Rwanda.

An experienced faculty development consultant, Meagher has offered workshops on: 1) infusing sustainability into the curriculum; 2) public philosophy; 3) civic engagement; 4) the utilization of performance methodologies for civic education.