Books by Richard H. Brodhead

As President of Duke University, Richard H. Brodhead spoke at numerous commencement ceremonies, community forums, and faculty meetings, and even appeared on the Colbert Report. Speaking of Duke collects dozens of these speeches, in which Brodhead speaks to issues central to Duke University and to higher education more generally.

Using a variety of historical sources, Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the domestic culture of letters; mass-produced cheap reading; the culture of post-emancipation black education. He describes how these socially structured worlds shaped literary practice for writers.