Joel Osborne Conarroe, a professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences, the former department chair of English, Penn’s first ombudsman from 1971 to 1973, and the dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences from 1983 to 1985, died on April 28. He was 89.

Dr. Conarroe was a 1956 honors graduate of Davidson College. He then earned a master’s degree from Cornell University a year later. He joined Penn’s faculty as an instructor in English in Penn’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences (now SAS) in 1964 and was promoted to assistant professor in 1966. In his first decade at Penn, he helped restructure the undergraduate English curriculum and was named the department’s undergraduate chair in 1970, a role he held for three years. As a special assistant to then-Vice Provost Leo Levin, he was also active in involving faculty in undergraduate life, and in 1968, he won the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. While teaching at Penn, Dr. Conarroe earned a PhD from New York University in 1966. In 1971, Dr. Conarroe was promoted to associate professor.

Also in 1971, then-Penn president Martin Myerson named Dr. Conarroe Penn’s first ombudsman (Almanac July 15, 1971), a newly created role. According to faculty senate chair Henry Abraham, Dr. Conarroe “plunged into the manifold tasks of his two-year tenure with élan and imagination.” In reports he wrote for Almanac (December 21, 1971, October 3, 1972, September 4, 1973), he expounded poetically about the joys of meeting a wide swath of faculty, staff, and students from across the University and helping them resolve issues. Dr. Conarroe ceded his position as ombudsman in 1973, returning to teaching in English and to his academic work, which included writing biographies of poets and compiling anthologies of their works. His books included William Carlos Williams’ Paterson: Language and Landscape (1970), John Berryman: An Introduction to the Poetry (1977), and, as editor, the collections Six American Poets: An Anthology (1993) and Eight American Poets: An Anthology (1997). During his time at Penn, he received several fellowships to support his work, serving as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Cornell Junior Fellow, and Danforth Foundation Fellow.In 1977, he was promoted to a full professor at Penn, and during the late 1970s, he also served as the faculty master of Van Pelt College House.

Dr. Conarroe spent 1978 to 1983 on leave from Penn as executive director of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the influential scholarly organization founded in 1883. At the MLA, he edited the influential PMLA Journal and acted as a spokesman for the humanities in the U.S. and abroad, in part as a member of the ACLS-Soviet Academy of Sciences Commission on the Humanities and Sciences. He led an MLA delegation to Moscow for a symposium on Walt Whitman at the Gorky Institute for World Literature. During this era, he also spent four summers at the Yaddo writers’ colony and served as vice president of the National Book Critics Circle.

In 1982, Penn enticed Dr. Conarroe to return as dean of the Faculty of Arts & Science (Almanac November 30, 1982) and as the Thomas S. Gates Professor. As dean, he produced the second-highest yearly fundraising total for the school, which helped fund the Mellon program to develop fresh graduate curricular options, the biology department’s plant sciences initiative, and the Center for Early American Studies. Dr. Conarroe also oversaw the founding of SAS and Wharton’s Lauder Institute, the expansion of the Writing Across the Curriculum initiative, and the formation of SAS’s External Affairs Office, which managed development and fundraising. In 1984, Dr. Conarroe resigned from the deanship (Almanac November 13, 1984).

Five months later, Dr. Conarroe was named the third president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a position he held until 2002. As president of the Guggenheim Foundation, he was deeply devoted to the foundation’s mission and worked tirelessly to increase the size of Guggenheim Fellowships (one of which he had received himself in 1977). “He was attuned to changing cultural mores—the twists and turns in dozens of academic and artistic fields—while dealing with the financial challenges and working to raise the amount of fellowships so that people could do their own work,” said Edward Hirsch, the current president of the foundation. Dr. Conarroe was also a trustee of the foundation from 1985 to 2016. While president of the foundation, Dr. Conarroe received honorary degrees from Davidson College, Rhodes College, University Maryland, and Tulane University. He also was a former president of the PEN America Center, chaired the National Book Awards in 1988, served on the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury in 1989, and sat on the National Book Foundation from 1991-1994.

Dr. Conarroe is survived by his nephews, Ron, Richard, and Michael Conarroe; a niece, Betty Johnson; and a sister, Harriet.