 | Peter Brooks |
Peter Brooks, Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, received a $1.5
million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, which
will enable him to initiate a dialogue on the teaching of the humanities and
professional education.
T H I S
IN MEMORIAM
Initiative to boost humanities-professional school interaction
The Mellon Awards are presented to scholars who have significantly influenced
the study of the humanities. Brooks was one of three recipients this year. The
funds support the recipient’s own research and the teaching of arts and
letters at an institutional level.
“Peter Brooks has been a prominent intellectual leader at Yale and throughout
the humanities. As an influential scholar, devoted teacher, and founding director
of the Whitney Humanities Center, he is enormously deserving of this recognition,” said
President Richard C. Levin.
Brooks is developing a program at Yale, titled “Ethics of Reading: The
Humanities and Professional Cultures,” that aims to reinvigorate the interplay
between the humanities and other fields at the professional level.
Building on his experience integrating humanistic reading with the study of law,
he will introduce workshops, seminars and guest lectures over the next three
years ?to stimulate discourse between faculty members at Yale’s professional
schools and scholars representing different disciplines within the liberal arts.
“Yale has great resources to call upon,” notes Brooks, who will focus
his efforts on the Schools of Law, Medicine, Architecture, Divinity and Management. “This
will be a learning experience for me,” he said.
Brooks holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard.
He also studied at University College in London as a Marshall Scholar and at
the University of Paris. He began teaching at Yale in 1965 and rose to the rank
of full professor in 1975. He has held joint appointments in the Departments
of French and Comparative Literature. In 1980 he was named the Chester D. Tripp
Professor of Humanities.
Brooks’ scholarship has focused on French and English novels of the 19th
and 20th centuries and the theory of narrative. The founding and longtime director
of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, he is noted for promoting cross-pollination
between the study of literature and ideas from other fields, most notably, psychoanalysis
and the law.
In the Mellon Award citation, Brooks is praised as “one of the leading
literary critics of his generation.” His extensive bibliography includes “Henry
James Goes to Paris,” “Realist Vision,” “Psychoanalysis
and Storytelling,” “Body Work,” “Reading for the Plot,” “The
Melodramatic Imagination,” “The Novel of Worldliness,” “Law’s
Stories” (edited with Yale colleague Paul Gewirtz) and “Whose Freud?” (co-authored
with Alex Woloch). He is also the author of a number of books on law and literature,
including “Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature.”
The New York Times, the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation
and the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities are some of the major publications
to which he has regularly contributed articles and reviews.
In addition to teaching courses in law and literature at Yale Law School, he
headed a program at the University of Virginia on the humanities and the law,
and serves on the editorial board of the Yale Journal of Law & Humanities.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Brooks has received
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. He served as Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford 2001-2002.
For the first term of the next academic year, Brooks will serve as a fellow of
the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress.
This is the third consecutive year that a Yale faculty member has received the
Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Achievement. The previous Yale recipients
are Joseph Roach and Ellen Rosand.
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