Richard H. Brodhead was the president of Duke University from 2004 to 2017 and served as the William Preston Few Professor of English. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He previously served as the dean of Yale College from 1993 to 2004 and as the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English at Yale University. He is the recipient of several awards, including four honorary degrees. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004, he cochaired its national Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. A scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, Brodhead is the author of several books, including
Baccalaureate: Frolics and Detours
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Published:March 2017
At his Baccalaureate address to the Class of 2008, the class with which he began his time at Duke, Richard Brodhead encourages the students to take advantage of unpredictable twists and turns in their lives after Duke, telling the story of a new reading room that Duke alumni volunteers created from a supply closet in a Washington, D.C. elementary school.
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