Meet Provost Sean Condon
Dr. John “Sean” Condon is provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Merrimack College.
A member of the Merrimack community since 2005, Dr. Condon has held top leadership roles, including vice provost for undergraduate education and faculty affairs from 2019-2020, and interim dean of liberal arts from 2016 to 2019.
Rising from the ranks of assistant professor to provost, he strongly believes in advancing community and belonging; hiring, supporting, and retaining faculty and staff; and ensuring excellence in the Merrimack student academic experience. Dr. Condon looks forward to continuing to work with faculty and staff to collectively and imaginatively engage with the challenges and opportunities facing the college as it embarks on the Agenda for the Future.
“By serving as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, I play a meaningful role in advancing both the mission and purpose of the College and support and champion institutional goals that I believe in. Since I arrived at Merrimack more than 20 years ago, I have come to fully appreciate and admire the ability of the College to consistently welcome students, meet them where they are, and help them reach their full potential.”
A history professor who has developed and taught courses ranging from race and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world through an environmental history of North America, Dr. Condon also served as chair of the history department and director of the international studies program. His historical research has centered on the ways that people strive for dignity, autonomy and community in times of profound social, economic and political change. Much of his scholarship has examined the efforts of enslaved people in the post-Revolutionary Upper South to resist family separation and strive for legal freedom through the process of manumission.
In addition to studying race and slavery, he has also re-examined the ways that economic and political divisions fueled a crisis of legitimacy for the newly independent United States. His book, “Shays’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America,” was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. Currently, he is working on a synthetic history that examines the broad spectrum and evolution of labor obligations in the Early Modern Atlantic World.