Richard H. Brodhead - Career at Yale

Career At Yale

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1972, Brodhead was appointed an assistant professor of English at Yale. In 1980, he received tenure and was named Director of Undergraduate Studies in English. By 1985, he had been made a full professor and was named chair of the English department. He was appointed Dean of Yale College in 1993 and served until 2004. Together with current Yale President Richard C. Levin, Brodhead oversaw a major curricular review at Yale.

An expert in 19-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 scholarly work has been honored by election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 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 the USA, Europe, and Asia.

As dean and as a professor supervising graduate students, Brodhead was involved in the controversy surrounding efforts by graduate student-employees (GESO) to unionize; he was accused of attempting to blacklist unionist students. In 2003, Brodhead was named a defendant along with, Richard Levin, Linda Lorimer in a lawsuit by Yale professor James Van de Velde claiming damage of reputation after Van de Velde was accused of murdering Suzanne Jovin, a female student, and Brodhead subsequently canceled his class citing his presence as a "major distraction." In 2007, A Connecticut Judge reopened Velde's lawsuit against Brodhead et al.