Benjamin Bernard Dunlap, 10th President of Wofford College, was born December 3, 1937, in Columbia, S. C. After graduating summa cum laude from Sewanee: The University of the South in 1959, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard University as a graduate student in English language and literature, receiving his PhD in 1967. Since that time, he has held academic appointments at Harvard, the University of South Carolina and Wofford College, where for seven years prior to becoming president he served as the Chapman Family Professor in the Humanities, a position he still holds. He has twice served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Bangkok, Thailand, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, and was a member of the inaugural class of U.S.-Japan Leadership Fellows in Tokyo.
Dunlap's academic fields include literature, intellectual history, Asian studies, film history and criticism, fiction writing, and the arts. On those subjects and others, especially higher education, he has lectured and spoken widely in this country and abroad including an appearance as one of "Fifty Remarkable People" at the 2007 TED Conference in Monterey. A frequent moderator for the Aspen Institute's Executive and C.E.O. Seminars as well as its Henry Crown Fellowship and such affiliated programs as the Executive Seminar Asia, the Faculty Seminars at Wye, the Aspen-Rodel Fellowship, the Africa Leadership Initiative, the Central European Leadership Initiative, and the Liberty Fellowship of South Carolina, he has also designed and moderated seminars in Europe, Africa, and the United States for corporate clients as varied as the Netflix Corporation, Young & Rubicam, the Nova Chemical Corporation, and the Arab Banking Corporation.
Dunlap's many publications include poems, essays, anthologies, guides, and opera libretti. As a writer-producer and on-camera talent for public television, he has been a major contributor to more than 200 programs, for which he has won numerous national and international awards, and, for four and a half years in the 1970s and 80s, he performed as soloist and principal dancer for the Columbia City Ballet. Frequently recognized for both teaching and research, he has recently completed a novel, Famous Dogs of the Civil War, which awaits publication.
Since 1963, he has been married to Anne Boyd Dunlap. They have three grown children. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, Sewanee: The University of the South.
