This summer, the Yale Alumni Magazine will feature the Koerner Center’s Intellectual Trajectories series in its July/August issue, spotlighting Richard Brodhead, A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor Emeritus of English, former dean of Yale College, and former president of Duke University, in his talk “I Learn by Going Where I Have to Go.” The magazine also features an article titled “A Thinker’s Life” by Molly Worthen ’03, ’11 Ph.D., associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her article, Worthen writes:
The Koerner Center has a wonderful custom of asking retired Yale faculty to give a lecture reflecting on the ideas and experiences that shaped them as scholars; each volume of this series is a collection of essays based on those talks. The essays are moving, entertaining, and more candid about personal struggles and academic politics than you might expect. Together they provide an eclectic window onto roughly a century of history: many of the essays in the early volumes begin in the Great Depression and World War II, while the most recent carry us through the latest round of culture wars. The stories they tell … help answer that ultimate question: what makes a person care deeply enough about something to devote their life to it? … The sheer breadth of experience in these volumes forces the reader to reflect on what constitutes a person’s intellectual journey, and how our own professional lives are a mix of rational intent, emotional momentum, and—perhaps mostly—chance.
Over one hundred memoirs have been transcribed and are published in four volumes, which are available for purchase through the Koerner Center.
Volume 4 (2021) contributors:
William Bailey, David L. Bartlett, Frank J. Bia, Richard Brodhead, Hazel V. Carby, Janice Carlisle, Lawrence S. Cohen, Adela Yarbro Collins, Angela A. Crowley, Deborah S. Davis, Peggy Deamer, Thomas P. Duffy, Gerald Friedland, Paul H. Fry, Dolores Hayden, Fred Kantor, Alan E. Kazdin, Joseph Roach, Ellen Rosand, Daniel E. Rosner, William Hurt Sledge, Howard Stern, and Barry L. Zaret
To order or for more information, contact emeritus@yale.edu or 203-432-8227.