Professor Peter Brooks
Peter Brooks, Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University, will become the Mellon Visiting Professor from 2008-2012 in the Department of Comparative Literature and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University and lecturer with the rank of professor from 2008-2014. Brooks, whose scholarly work crosses several disciplines, including literature, law, and psychiatry, is currently director of a Mellon project, "Ethics in Reading and Cultures of Professionalism," which will offer a series of seminars under the aegis of the Department of Comparative Literature and the University Center for Human Values. Brooks received a $1.5 million dollar Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2007 to enable him to initiate a dialogue on the teaching of the humanities and professional education through the seminar series, workshops, and guest lectures. He will also be offering a series of regular graduate and undergraduate courses. The award citation describes Brooks as “one of the leading literary critics of his generation.”
Brooks has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University, the University of Texas, Austin, the University of Copenhagen, the University of Bologna, and the Georgetown University Law Center, and as Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford Law School in 1994. In 2001-2002, he was Eastman Professor at Oxford University, and Fellow of Balliol College. He was University Professor at the University of Virginia from 2003 to 2006, where he taught in the English Department and the Law School.
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 at Yale, he also taught courses on law and literature as a visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School. Brooks was the founding and long-time director of Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, which promotes cross-disciplinary study of literature and other fields.
His extensive bibliography includes Realist Vision (2005), Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000), Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994), Body Work (1993), Reading for the Plot (Knopf, 1984), The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and The Novel of Worldliness (1969). He co-edited, with Paul Gewirtz, Law’s Stories (1996) and, with Alex Woloch, Whose Freud? Princeton University Press published Brooks’ most recent book, Henry James Goes to Paris in spring 2007.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 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.
