Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 2, 2001

Volume 29, Number 21

Two-Week Issue

Peter Brooks

Brooks appointed to Sterling Professorship

Literary scholar Peter Brooks, who has been honored with an appointment as Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature, is noted for his scholarly work cutting across several disciplines, including law and psychiatry.

Brooks also fostered interdisciplinary, intellectual collaborations among Yale faculty members and outside scholars in the humanities and diverse fields as the founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center. Brooks was the center's director from its inception in 1980 until 1991, and returned to that role in 1997. He will complete this second term as the center's director later this year.

A member of the Yale faculty since 1965, Brooks' main areas of interest are the French 19th-century novel, European romanticism and the theory of narrative. In addition to teaching in the French and comparative literature departments, he also periodically teaches courses on law and literature as a visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School.

His books include the recently published "Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature" ; "Psychoanalysis and Storytelling"; "Body Work"; "Reading for the Plot"; "The Melodramatic Imagination"; and "The Novel of Worldliness."

With Yale law professor Paul Gewirtz, Brooks edited "Law's Stories," and he has been editor or coeditor of nine other books, including a volume of "Western Literature," "Genet: A Collection of Critical Essays," "Henry James, 'The Wings of the Dove,'" and "Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture." He also wrote a novel, titled "World Elsewhere," that is based on a real-life prince's expedition to Tahiti.

In addition, Brooks has written numerous articles, essays and reviews.

A graduate of Harvard University, where he also earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees, Brooks studied at University College in London as a Marshall Scholar and at the University of Paris. He became an instructor at Yale after completing his doctorate and rose through the ranks to become a full professor in 1975. He was named the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities in 1980.

An acting master at Pierson College early in his Yale career, Brooks was also director of undergraduate studies in French, director of The Literature Major, director of graduate studies in comparative literature, director of the Division of the Humanities, and chair of the Departments of French and Comparative Literature.

Brooks has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Bologna and the Georgetown University Law Center. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School in 1994 and will serve during the 2001-02 academic year as Eastman Professor at Oxford University.

The associate editor of Yale French Studies, Brooks was a member of numerous advisory and editorial boards beyond Yale. He currently serves on the Humanities Initiatives Committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Advisory Council of the New York Public Library and the advisory board of the Stanford Humanities Center.

Brooks was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His other honors include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was decorated an Officier des Palmes Académiques in 1986 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1997.

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