Biography

Richard H. Brodhead became Duke’s ninth president on July 1, 2004, after a 32-year career at Yale University.  In addition to serving as president, he is a professor of English at Duke.

Since arriving at Duke, Brodhead has focused much of his leadership on enriching the undergraduate experience of Duke students and expanding the university’s financial aid endowment to ensure that a Duke education is accessible to qualified students regardless of their family’s financial circumstances.  He has called for Duke to become an international center in addressing health care inequities through a major global health initiative involving faculty and schools across the university, and has championed Duke’s efforts to bring the fruits of faculty and student research through a translational process to serve society.  Brodhead has also been active in Durham promoting K-12 public education, several new community health clinics, neighborhood revitalization through the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, and the future strategic direction of the Research Triangle Park.

Nationally, Brodhead has been involved with education issues through a number of organizations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, of which he is a trustee.  He has also held a Presidential appointment to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which is engaged with issues of international education and cross-cultural exchange.  Brodhead also serves on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Security Higher Education Advisory Board.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Brodhead graduated from Yale in 1968 and received his Ph.D. there in 1972.  He then joined the Yale faculty, where he became the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and American Studies.  An expert in 19-century American literature, Brodhead has written or edited more than a dozen books on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles W. Chestnutt, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Richard Wright and Eudora Welty, among others.  Brodhead’s pioneering edition of the diaries of Charles W. Chestnutt, the leading African-American author of the post-Civil War generation, led him to do substantial research on the history of North Carolina before he came to Duke.  His scholarly work has been honored by election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  A devoted teacher, Brodhead won the DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching at Yale and spent eight summers teaching high school teachers at the Bread Loaf School at Middlebury, Vermont.  He has lectured widely in universities in this country and in Europe and Asia.

After serving as chair of Yale’s Department of English for six years, Brodhead was named dean of Yale College in 1993 and served in the post for 11 years until he assumed Duke’s presidency.  His writings as dean are collected in The Good of This Place:  Values and Challenges in College Education.  He was presented with the 2006 Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal by the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association.  

Brodhead was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in May 2006 and received an Honorary Doctoral Degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing in June 2006; this is only the ninth honorary degree to be awarded to a non-Chinese person at Tsinghua, the second to a foreign university leader, and the first to a humanist.  He also received a Doctor of Humanities honorary degree from Fisk University in May 2007.

Brodhead and his wife Cynthia, an attorney, have been married for 39 years.  Their son Daniel, 30, lives and works in New York City.

September 2009