Diane Berrett Brown

Diane Berrett Brown is deputy director of the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC). Before coming to Yale in 2020, she served as managing editor of Diacritics, the cutting-edge journal of theory and criticism at Cornell University; she also played a pivotal role in founding a law and humanities book series, Corpus Juris, at Cornell University Press. Her background in scholarly publishing led her to introduce the Whitney Publishing Project, with a wide range of workshops, visiting editors, and other events to support scholars at Yale. At the WHC, she oversees a diverse array of programs—from fellowships and grants to public lectures and film screenings. She has brought graduate students to the WHC in meaningful ways, including Graduate Fellows in the Environmental Humanities, Professional Development Fellows, and film programming curators. Together with the director and the talented staff at the WHC, Diane works to cultivate interdisciplinary collaboration and meaningful dialogue among humanities scholars at Yale. She also works behind the scenes as an advocate for the humanities—most recently this work includes developing a shared humanities calendar and the new books in the humanities digital monitor in HQ.

Diane’s academic area of expertise is eighteenth-century French literature and philosophy, especially pedagogical fictions and the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. She is a fellow of Grace Hopper College.

Diane is eager to support new initiatives, events, and programs in the humanities. Please write to her with ideas, questions, or queries at diane.b.brown@yale.edu (link sends e-mail) (there are two Diane Browns at Yale—please include the “b”).