Biography

Richard H. Brodhead became Duke’s ninth president on July 1, 2004, after a 32-year career at Yale University. Brodhead, who was installed as president on Sept. 18, 2004, also is a professor of English at Duke.

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. 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.

An expert in 19th-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, a 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 dedicated teacher, Brodhead won the DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching at Yale and spent eight summers teaching high school teachers at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury, Vermont. 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. The degree from Tsinghua was only the ninth honorary degree to be awarded there to a non-Chinese person, the second to a foreign university leader and the first to a scholar specializing in the humanities.

Brodhead has lectured widely at universities in this country and in Europe and Asia. Nationally, he has been involved with education issues through the Business-Higher Education Forum, of which he is a member, and 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 and his wife Cynthia, an attorney, have been married since 1970. Their son Daniel lives and works in New York City.