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Ronald R. Thomas (born January 29, 1949) is an American writer, educator, and 13th president of the University of Puget Sound. He held faculty and administrative appointments at University of Chicago, Harvard University, Trinity College, and the University of Puget Sound.

Early life
Thomas was born in Orange, New Jersey to Doris R. and Robert L. Thomas. His mother was an elementary school teacher and his father’s career was in accounting and university administration at Monmouth University. Ron’s only sibling, Ruth Ann (Thomas) Beltle was born on March, 16, 1947. Thomas grew up in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and graduated from Neptune High School in 1967. He received a BA in English Literature (magna cum laude) from Wheaton College (1971) and an MA (1978) and PhD (1983) in English and American Literature from Brandeis University.

Career
After graduating from college, Thomas moved to Boston to join Clear Light Productions as a film and media producer. In 1976, he enrolled at Brandeis University to earn an MA and PhD in English and American Literature, focusing on the nineteenth-century novel. In 1982, he was appointed assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago where he remained until 1990. Thomas then returned to the East Coast to serve as professor and chair in the English Department at Trinity College.

He was named Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard in 1991–92, taking a leave from Trinity to begin research on his second book project, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Thomas was appointed college vice president and chief of staff at Trinity in 1998, overseeing implementation of Trinity’s campus master plan and its nationally recognized engagement with the community. He was chosen as Trinity’s interim president for 2001–02 and, in 2003 began his 13-year tenure as President of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA.

Higher Education and Administration
Ron Thomas served as the thirteenth president of the University of Puget Sound from July 16, 2003 to June 30, 2016. Major projects during his tenure included a 20-year campus master plan; a strategic plan of action that positioned the university as a national leader in liberal arts education with a focus on civic engagement and innovation; and an ambitious comprehensive capital campaign.

Thomas believes that good scholarship and good citizenship are inextricably linked, and that higher education should be “a cauldron for leadership, a great national asset through which to create and test ideas, to discover and expand knowledge, to critique and transform our culture.” During his tenure, Thomas launched the university's Civic Scholarship Initiative, which tackled environmental sustainability, social justice and equity, and race in American education and culture. He also led new enrollment partnerships with the Tacoma Public Schools and the Posse Foundation to expand the university’s commitment to diversity, equity, and access.

Under Thomas’s leadership, Puget Sound was included in the pretigious Colleges That Change Lives. The listing singles out Puget Sound for the distinctively positive, transformational effects that its dedicated faculty, innovative curriculum, and engaging community have on the lives of students and the accomplishments of graduates.

Students at the University of Puget Sound called him “RonThom.”

In 2017, following his presidency, Thomas helped form Reinstitute, a group that works with campus leaders “to deepen the understanding of the fundamental challenges and transformations facing higher education and to implement mission-based action plans in response to them.” Thomas also serves on the governing boards of the College of Idaho and Vashon Center for the Arts in Washington State.

Scholarship
Much of Thomas’s scholarly work focuses on the role of the novel, and the interplay between fiction and reality, during the period stretching roughly from the Victorian Age through Modernity. For instance, Thomas “helped to pioneer a tradition of reading nineteenth-century literary realism... alongside and through photographic innovation,” and he “used the analogy of the body to examine the image of the detective’s city [in literature] as a closed system.”

Published books

 * Dreams of Authority: Freud and the Fictions of the Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 1990), which shows how the representation of dream accounts in Victorian novels shaped Freud’s understanding of the human psyche. It was called “an intelligent and subtle book.”
 * Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge University Press, 1999), “the first book-length work to examine critically how the history of forensic detection intersects with the development of the detective genre in the early part of the twentieth-century.”
 * Nineteenth Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (Rutgers University Press, 2002), a collection of essays co-edited with Helena Michie, examines how the period’s art and literature—in Britain and America—fundamentally altered the way we experience and conceive of time and space.

Thomas has published two chapters of a forthcoming book titled Moving Pictures and Telling Stories: Specters of the Novel on Film. The project investigates the shifting conceptions of persons in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction in relation to the invention of cinema.

Honors
Thomas has twice been awarded honorary doctorates: a doctor of humane letters, honoris causa, from Trinity College in 2002, and another from the University of Portland in 2016 , both for outstanding contributions to scholarship and teaching and for national leadership in higher education and public service.

In 2016 the University of Puget Sound Board of Trustees conferred the name “Thomas Hall” on the campus’s newest building, honoring Ron and Mary Thomas for their “exceptional leadership and for the landmark transformations made at the college during their 13 years of service.”

Additional honors

 * Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities Harvard University (1991-92)
 * Margaret Church Modern Fiction Studies Prize, for year’s best published essay (1986)
 * National Endowment of the Arts Summer Research Fellowship (1995)
 * Dean Arthur A. Hughes Award for Distinguished Teaching Achievement (Trinity College, 1997)
 * Gold Award for Outstanding Writing of President’s Columns (Council for Advancement and Support of Education, 2008)
 * President’s Award for outstanding commitment to student life from Region V of NASPA, the national organization of student affairs professionals (2015)

Personal Life
Ron Thomas married Mary Domingo Thomas on June 15, 1991 at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Italy. The couple met at Trinity, where Mary served as Dean of Students and Lecturer in Classics.