Richard H. Brodhead Biography

Richard H. Brodhead became Duke's ninth president on July 1, 2004, after a 32-year career at Yale University, including 11 years as dean of Yale College.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, he graduated from Yale in 1968 and received his Ph.D. there in 1972. An expert in 19th-century American literature, Brodhead has written or edited more than a dozen books on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles W. Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Richard Wright and Eudora Welty, among others. His many essays and lectures examine subjects ranging from multiculturalism to the role of education in a democratic society to the globalization of comparative literature. In addition, Brodhead has served on the editorial boards of several publications in the humanities, among them American Literary History and Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. In addition to serving as president of Duke, he is a professor of English.

In 1993, he published two editions of Charles W. Chesnutt's writing through Duke University Press. His work on the diaries of this leading African-American author of the post-Civil War generation led Brodhead to do substantial research on the history of North Carolina in the post-emancipation period.

He has taught and lectured widely in the fields of English and American literature, and has won the DeVane Medal at Yale for outstanding teaching. After serving as chair of Yale's Department of English for six years, Brodhead was named dean of Yale College in 1993, and was named the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and American Studies in 1995.

As dean, he had oversight of undergraduate education and the faculty appointment process, with policy responsibilities in such areas as admissions, financial aid, student services and student life. He had a major role in opening undergraduate admissions to students from around the world and extending need-based financial aid to international students. He also chaired the most significant review of undergraduate education at Yale in a generation, leading to major revisions in the teaching of science, the arts, and in international study. His writings as dean are collected in The Good of This Place: Values and Challenges in College Education.

A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Brodhead has won several scholarly honors and fellowships, including Guggenheim, Woodrow Wilson, Danforth and Morse fellowships. President George W. Bush appointed him to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in 2002.

Brodhead and his wife, Cynthia, an attorney, have been married for more than 30 years. Their son Daniel Brodhead, a 2001 graduate of Yale, lives and works in New York City.