Richard Brodhead

Richard Brodhead, the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor Emeritus of English, received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale and served on the Yale faculty from 1972 to 2004, teaching widely in the fields of English and American Studies. While still untenured, he was awarded the DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching. He was named the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and chaired the Yale Department of English before becoming dean of Yale College in 1993. His scholarly works include The School of Hawthorne; Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America; and The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt. His writings as dean are collected in The Good of this Place (2004).

Professor Brodhead became president of Duke University in 2004. In his thirteen years there he made access and opportunity his highest priority, raising over $1 billion for financial aid endowment. He also oversaw the renovation of Duke’s historic campus and the establishment of many of Duke’s best-known international programs, while partnering in the revitalization of downtown Durham, North Carolina. Speaking of Duke (2017) collects his major writings from these years.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and co-chaired the academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the recipient of several honorary degrees, including from Tsinghua University in Beijing. For his national role in higher education, Professor Brodhead was given the Academic Leadership Award by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

In 2024 Brodhead was asked to serve as Interim Paul Mellon Director of the Yale Center for British Art.