studies. He established Cornell research centers in South and Southeast Asia and North and South America. In 1947, Sharp began the Cornell-Thailand Project, a ground-breaking initiative to collate baseline data in a comprehensive study of a farming village (Bang Chan) on the outskirts of Bangkok. Sharp also founded and was the first director between 1950 and 1960 of Cornell's Southeast Asia Program, for which he recruited a multi-disciplinary faculty, developed a strong language program and started what become the foremost library resource on South East Asia. Sharp provided for scholars from the areas studied to receive training in such programs, in addition to hundreds of Western scholars. He chaired the Cornell Faculty Committee, which in 1961 saw the creation of the university's Center for International Studies. Aside from realizing Sharp's longtime dream of Southeast Asian research, the Thailand project also marked the start of his collaboration with Lucien Hanks and Jane Hanks of Bennington College. This continued in the Bennington-Cornell Project started in 1963, which entailed a broad regional survey of the upland and lowland peoples of northern Thailand. His wife, Ruth Burdick Sharp, contributed her acquired expertise in anthropology and ceramics to this project. Despite health problems which made field research difficult after retirement, Sharp maintained his activity at Cornell and abroad. He worked with his research documents on Thailand as well as on Australian Aborigines. Publications and organizations Sharp's professional career spanned wide geographical areas. As a scholar-researcher, he studied indigenous cultures on four continents. Several of his publications became classics in their fields: Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians (1952), People Without Politics (1958), and Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities in Southeast Asia (1962). A number of his coauthored works exhibited his multidisciplinary research and interest in culture change, such as Siamese Rice Village (1953) and Bang Chan: Social History of A Rural Community in Thailand (1978). Sharp had a reputation for passion in passing on his experiences to future generations. Sharp was president of the Association for Asian Studies from 1961 to 1962. He was a founding member of the Society for Applied Anthropology and a founding trustee of the Asia Society. He served on the governing boards of the American Anthropological Association and the Siam Society. He won Guggenheim, Fulbright, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Upon retiring, he was presented with a two-volume festschrift, one celebrating his contributions to studies of cultural change and applied