David Bromwich


David Bromwich is Sterling Professor of English at Yale University.

Career

After graduating from Yale with a B.A. in 1973 and a Ph.D. four years later, Bromwich became an instructor at Princeton University, where he was promoted to Mellon Professor of English before returning to Yale in 1988. In 1995 he was appointed Housum Professor of English at Yale. In 2006 he became a Sterling Professor.
Bromwich is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely on Romantic criticism and poetry, and on eighteenth-century politics and moral philosophy. His book Politics by Other Means concerns the role of critical thinking and tradition in higher education, and defends the practice of liberal education against political encroachments from both Left and Right. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other U.S. and British journals. He is a frequent contributor of political blog posts on the Huffington Post. Since 2017, he has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, NC.
Bromwich's collection of essays Skeptical Music was awarded the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2002.

Political views

Bromwich argued forcefully against American intervention in the Syrian conflict. He has been a frequent critic of the Obama administration's caution and failure to achieve more of the Democratic party's policy agenda. He criticized the 2011 State of the Union Address for a lack of focus on gun control and immigration and for rhetorical concessions to conservative ideology. In 2014, he criticized the "disengagement" of the administration, saying that President Barack Obama "watches the world as its most important spectator."