Richard Halleck Brodhead (born April 17, 1947) is an American scholar of 19th-century American literature and served as the ninth president of Duke University. Early life and education Brodhead was born April 17, 1947, in Dayton, Ohio. His family moved to Fairfield, Connecticut when he was six years old, where he attended public schools. He went on to attend Phillips Academy, where his high school classmates included Dick Wolf and George W. Bush. Brodhead graduated from Yale College in 1968 summa cum laude (with Highest Distinction in the English major). During his senior year at Yale was tapped for membership in the secret society Manuscript and a member of the Elizabethan Club. He continued at Yale for graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in English in 1972. He met his wife, Cynthia Degnan, while both were graduate students 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 as Bird White Housum Professor of English. He was appointed Dean of Yale College in 1993 and served until 2004. Together with Yale President Richard C. Levin, Brodhead oversaw a major curricular review at Yale. An expert in 19th-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 United States, 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