Richard Brodhead

Richard H. Brodhead is the ninth President of Duke University and the William Preston Few Professor of English. He is a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature and a national leader in higher education.

Since arriving at Duke in 2004, Brodhead has enriched undergraduate education, working to unify Duke’s academic opportunities with the residential experience. Brodhead led the expansion of Duke’s financial aid endowment to ensure that admitted students can afford to attend regardless of their financial circumstances. Under his leadership, Duke has engaged in a renewal of iconic campus buildings—the West Union, Rubenstein Library, Duke Chapel, and Baldwin and Page Auditoriums—that has preserved historic exteriors while transforming interiors into welcoming spaces that foster true community. Duke also established the Duke Global Health Institute, an interdisciplinary center that works to translate research findings to address health care inequities and improve the health of people around the world, and launched the signature program DukeEngage, which gives Duke undergraduates the opportunity to apply their classroom knowledge in service to society, either in the U.S. or around the world.

Brodhead has made globalization a major strategic priority for the University. He oversaw the creation of the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School (link is external) in partnership with the National University of Singapore. Duke Kunshan University (link is external), a joint venture institution created by Duke University and Wuhan University in China, opened in August 2014, offering degree and non-degree academic programs for students from China and around the world.

Closer to home, Brodhead is a champion of the relationship between Duke University and the City of Durham. Under his leadership, Duke’s investments have strengthened K-12 public education, funded several new community health clinics, and spurred downtown renewal and neighborhood revitalization through the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership. He is also involved in shaping the future strategic direction of the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina.

Brodhead served as chairman of the Atlantic Coast Conference Council of Presidents during a time of historic conference realignment.

Brodhead is leading Duke Forward, a comprehensive fundraising campaign, which runs through June 2017. The largest campaign in Duke’s history, it has already surpassed its goal of $3.25 billion to enrich the Duke experience and give Duke’s talented students, faculty, and medical practitioners opportunities to advance ideas, make new connections, and move the world forward.

Nationally, Brodhead is a leader in education issues and a spokesperson for the value of the humanities. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004, he was named the Co-Chair of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences (link is external), created by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at the request of a bipartisan group of Congressmen and Senators to bolster teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences. The Commission issued its report, The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences for a vibrant, competitive, and secure nation (link is external) in June 2013. Brodhead discussed the report on the PBS NewsHour (link is external) and “The Colbert Report.”

Brodhead served as a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 2004 to 2012 and has held a Presidential appointment to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He also served on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Security Higher Education Advisory Board. In 2013, he was named a trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He received the Academic Leadership Award from the Carnegie Corporation in 2013.

Prior to coming to Duke, Brodhead had a 32-year career at Yale University. 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 served as the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English and American Studies. Brodhead has written or edited more than a dozen books on American literature, analyzing the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Richard Wright and Eudora Welty. Brodhead researched and edited the pioneering edition of the diaries of Charles W. Chesnutt, the leading African-American author of the post-Civil War generation. 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 of English at Middlebury College, in Middlebury, Vermont. He has lectured widely in universities in the U.S., 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. As dean, he undertook a major revision of the Yale undergraduate curriculum. His writings as dean are collected in The Good of This Place: Values and Challenges in College Education.

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 was 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 and received an honorary Associate of Science degree from Miami Dade College in 2014.

On April 28, 2016, Brodhead announced that he would end his tenure as Duke's president on June 30, 2017. Afterwards, he will take a one-year sabbatical before returning to academia as a writer and instructor.

Contact a speaker booking agent to check availability on Richard Brodhead and other top speakers and celebrities.