Stephen James Blackwood is a scholar, academic administrator, and social entrepreneur born in 1975. He is the founding president of Ralston College, a start-up institution of higher education in Savannah.[1] He also sits on the board of the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation.[2] The literary theorist Stanley Fish discussed Blackwood and Ralston College at some length in the New York Times in November 2010.[3]
He was educated at the University of King's College,[4] Dalhousie University,[5] and Emory University,[6] from which he received a PhD in Religion in April 2010. In 2009-2010 he was a fellow in the English Department of Harvard University.[7][8] His primary area of academic expertise is the literary history of philosophy, and he is a specialist in Boethius (his Philosophia's Dress appeared in Volume XX of Dionysius[9]).
In his mid-twenties he was the founding executive director of St George's YouthNet,[10] an educational mentoring program for inner-city youth in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after which he was for two years a teaching fellow in the Foundation Year Programme,[11] a core-text program for first-year undergraduates at the University of King's College.
He is a citizen of both the United States and Canada.