Pericles Lewis

Reporting to the president and the provost, he is responsible for ensuring that the broader global initiatives of the university serve Yale’s academic goals and priorities. From 2012 to 2017 Professor Lewis served as founding president of Yale-NUS College, a collaboration between Yale and the National University of Singapore. Under his leadership, the college developed into a thriving model of residential liberal arts education much admired and studied throughout Asia and the world.

Pericles Lewis earned his B.A. with first-class honors in English literature from McGill University in 1990 and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1997. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Yale faculty in 1998, with appointments in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. His teaching has included undergraduate surveys of English poetry, the European epic tradition, and literary theory, and courses on modernism in literature and the arts, ranging from freshman to graduate seminars. He has received a variety of honors and awards for his contributions to research, teaching, and service.

A former member of the advisory board of the American Comparative Literature Association, Professor Lewis also serves on several editorial boards and as an advisor to various academic publishers, foundations, and educational institutions in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, and Japan. He is the author or editor of six books and has written for academic journals as well as the Chronicle of Higher Education, Times Higher Education, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Professor Lewis is a citizen of both Canada and the United States. His wife, Sheila Hayre, a graduate of Yale Law School and former staff attorney at New Haven Legal Assistance, now teaches at Quinnipiac University Law School in North Haven, Connecticut. They live in New Haven with their two children.