Established by the Office of the President in 2023, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study (JNBC) provides a laboratory space for the development of academically rigorous projects from across the university that challenge, address and engage the wider public. 

September 2025

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the webpage of the newly launched John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study (JNBC)!  I invite you to browse the site for an overview of the center and an introduction to its activities.  

I became the Director of the JNBC in 2023 after serving eleven years as the Dean of the Faculty at Brown where I have been a faculty member for nearly three decades.  My academic training is in comparative literature with a focus on the nineteenth century.  I have also translated and written extensively about the works of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and critic whose writings of the 1920s and 1930s have established him as one of the most influential intellectual figures of our day.  Throughout my career I have approached all of my work as a scholar, a teacher, and an administrator as continuous with the university’s fundamental mission to create and disseminate knowledge.  

My experience, in particular over the past decade as a dean, has convinced me of the urgent need today for the university to engage more deliberately and forcefully with the public. Today more than ever it has become urgent for us to work toward a transformation of the relationship between the university and the public that keeps specialized knowledge tied to the best interests of the broader society.  The university needs to build a stronger partnership with the public.  And so with the generous support of President Paxson and the Brown University leadership, I have set the JNBC on a new course to help the university meet this critical challenge. 

Guidance for this project has been provided to me, appropriately, by my own research, in particular the cultural criticism of Benjamin on which I have been working throughout my career.  Of special relevance to the new mission of the JNBC that I have just described is a pair of articles on popularization that Benjamin wrote in the early 1930s in connection with his experiments in the then new medium of radio.  To clarify the goal of his radio broadcasts Benjamin describes two kinds of popularization:  one that takes place when knowledge developed by specialists is simplified and transmitted to the broader public; and another that occurs when the dynamic interaction itself between the specialists and the broader public generates new knowledge. With the second kind of popularization, Benjamin observes, “we are dealing with a popularity that sets in motion not only knowledge in the direction of the public, but at the same time the public in the direction of knowledge.” Not simply transmitted by the specialists to the public, knowledge in the latter case is created by the mutual engagement of the one with the other.  

Benjamin privileges this second kind of popularization as a process, not just of the communication of knowledge, but of its democratization. The John Nicholas Brown Center is committed to promoting dynamic interactions of this kind between the academic specialists who are at the cutting edge of research underway in the university and the broader public by providing support for faculty projects that aspire to create the new knowledge that emerges out of these engagements. 

Faculty interested in the details of this program are invited to consult the link to “Democratizing Knowledge Project” under “Collaborations and Initiatives” on the JNBC webpage.

I look forward to working with all of those who share my sense of the urgency of this effort.

Sincerely,

Kevin McLaughlin
Director, John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study
George Hazard Crooker Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German Studies
Dean Emeritus of the Faculty