The Daniel F. Breeden Eminent Scholar Chair was established in 1989 to provide support for both the academic and the outreach missions of the College of Liberal Arts. The chair is supported by an endowment from Dr. Daniel F. Breeden. Persons named to the Breeden Eminent Chair must be nationally recognized in their field with outstanding credentials in arts or humanities. They must also demonstrate potential and willingness to engage in outreach activities in the community. The Breeden Chair must also contribute a unique quality, characteristic or function to the teaching and learning objectives of the College of Liberal Arts.
2023 Breeden Scholar
Eileen John
Guest Faculty, Department of Philosophy
Dr. Eileen John is Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. She is internationally-recognized as a philosopher of art, especially for her work on how literature engages us both as thinkers and as moral agents. John will teach a capstone seminar in the Department of Philosophy and participate in several campus and community events.
Dr. John earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan and served as assistant and associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Louisville from 1993 to 2005, when she began serving as associate professor at the University of Warwick.
2022 Breeden Scholar
Khari Allen Lee
Guest Faculty, Department of Music
Khari Allen Lee has arisen as one of the most-in-demand saxophonists, educators, composers, and multi-instrumentalists of his generation. He has performed and recorded with such luminaries as Alvin Batiste, Ellis Marsalis, the Treme Brass Band, Dr. John, Aretha Franklin, Terence Blanchard, Stevie Wonder, DeeDee Bridgewater, Branford Marsalis & many more. In addition to releasing three well-received albums with his own the group, the New Creative Collective, he is lead saxophonist and touring member of Delfeayo Marsalis’ Uptown Jazz Orchestra, Sextets and Quintets, former lead saxophonist of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra directed by Adonis Rose, and was a faculty member at both the University of New Orleans and Loyola University, following his extended tenure at the prestigious New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA).
2020 Breeden Scholar
Esteban del Valle
Guest Faculty, Department of Art & Art History
Esteban del Valle is a Brooklyn, NY based interdisciplinary artist originally from Chicago, IL. He received his M.F.A. from RISD and has exhibited his work and produced murals internationally. His work has been featured in various publications, including HiFructose and Washington Post. Del Valle has been the recipient of several visual arts residencies and fellowships including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program, and The Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship. Del Valle also has original work in several permanent collections including the Urban Nation in Berlin, Germany and The Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, NJ. During his time at Auburn, del Valle will teach a Contemporary Mural Art studio course. Students in the course will work on public murals in downtown Opelika.
2019 Breeden Scholar
David Marlow
Guest Faculty, Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures
Dr. David Marlow is a professor of linguistics and English as a second language at the University of South Carolina Upstate. He holds a Ph.D. in English: applied linguistics, a Master of Arts in applied linguistics and teaching English to speakers of other languages, and a Master of Science in information science. He has taught ESOL in China, Japan, Nicaragua, and the United States. Dr. Marlow seeks to enhance the understanding of linguistic diversity and encourage informed approaches to speakers of non-standard dialects, both international and domestic, though education, community outreach, and academic research.
2018 Breeden Scholar
Bernard LaFayette, Jr.
Bernard LaFayette Jr. was a cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a leader in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins, a Freedom Rider, an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the national coordinator of the Poor People's Campaign.
He is Distinguished Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Chair of the National Board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
For Spring 2018, he will teach CCEN 3200: Leadership for a Global Society: International Nonviolent Movements.
2017 Breeden Scholar
Mark Hersey
Guest Faculty, Department of History
Mark Hersey is an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University where he directs the Center for the History of Agriculture, Science, and the Environment of the South (CHASES). He is currently at work on a book project that explores the history of the physiographic Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi, paying special attention to the connections between identity, land use, race, and poverty. His interest in the project was sparked by research conducted for his first book, My Work Is That Of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (2011), which resituated the work of the iconic Tuskegee scientist, placing it within America’s conservation tradition. A leading figure in the burgeoning field of southern environmental history, Hersey has authored numerous articles and book chapters and is the co-editor (with Ted Steinberg) of a forthcoming volume that offers perspectives on environmental history and its future inspired by the career of Donald Worster, one of the field’s foremost practitioners. He is currently editing a special issue of the Alabama Review that explores the environmental history of the Yellowhammer State, and is co-editing a themed issue of the History of Science that centers on the cross-pollination of environmental history and the history science. He currently serves as an editor for the University of Alabama Press’s NEXUS: New Histories of Science, Technology, the Environment, Agriculture, and Medicine series, and as a list editor for H-Rural.
2015-2016 Breeden Scholar
Cristina Rivera-Garza
Guest Faculty, Department of World Languages, Literatures & Cultures
Cristina Rivera-Garza is the award-winning author of six novels, three collections of short stories, five collections of poetry and three non-fiction books. Originally written in Spanish, these works have been translated into multiple languages, including English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Korean. The recipient of the Roger Caillois Award for Latin American Literature (Paris, 2013); as well as the Anna Seghers (Berlin, 2005), she is the only author who has won the International Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize twice, in 2001 for her novel Nadie me verá llorar (translated into English by Andrew Hurley as No One Will See Me Cry ) and again in 2009 for her novel La muerte me da. She has translated, from English into Spanish, Notes on Conceptualisms by Vanessa Place and Robet Fitterman; and, from Spanish into English, "Nine Mexican Poets edited by Cristina Rivera Garza," in New American Writing 31. She is currently the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of California, San Diego.
Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación, her most recent book of criticism, comparatively explores the contemporary discussions surrounding conceptualist writing in the United States, post-exotism in France, as well as communally-based writing throughout the Americas.
She was born in Mexico (Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 1964), and has lived in the United States since 1989. She studied urban sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and received her PhD in Latin American history from the University of Houston. She has written extensively on the social history of mental illness in early twentieth-century Mexico, and published academic articles in journals and edited volumes in the United States, England, Argentina and Mexico. She received a Doctorate in Humane Letters Honoris Causa from the University of Houston in 2012.
2014-2015 Breeden Scholar
Rick Lowe
Guest Faculty, Department of Art & Art History
Rick Lowe is an artist who resides in Houston, Texas. His formal training is in the visual arts. Over the past twenty years he has worked both inside and outside of art world institutions by participating in exhibitions and developing community-based art projects.
Rick's work has been exhibited at the Phoenix Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York, Kwangji Bienale, Kwangji, Korea; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Glassell School; Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Kumamoto State Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; and the Venice Architecture Bienale.
His community building projects include Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas; Watts House Project, Los Angeles, CA; Arts Plan for Rem Koolhaus designed Seattle Public Library with Jessica Cusick; Borough Project for Spoleto Festival with Suzanne Lacy, Charleston, SC; Delray Beach Cultural Loop, Delray Beach, Florida; and a project for the Seattle Art Museum in their new Olympic Sculpture Park with David Adjaye.
Rick has been honored with the Rudy Bruner Award in Urban Excellence; the AIA Keystone Award; the Heinz Award in the arts and humanities; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Governors Award; Loeb Fellow at Harvard University; Skandalaris Award for Excellence in Art Architecture; USA Booth Fellowship; and the Creative Time Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change.
2013 Breeden Scholar
Tom Hallock
Guest Faculty, Department of English
Tom Hallock is an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual & Verbal Arts at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He is the author of From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics and the Roots of a National Pastoral (2003, UNC Press) and co-editor of William Bartram, the Search for Nature’s Design: Selected Art, Letters and Unpublished Writings (2010, UGA Press). Hallock is a graduate of Dickinson College and holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from New York University.
2012 Breeden Scholar
Patricia Foster
Guest Faculty, Department of English
- Department of English, University of Iowa
- The Auburn Writers Conference: The Winding Road: Travel, Identity, and the Search for Voice
2010 - 2012 Breeden Scholar
Dr. Mary Helen Brown
Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts School of Communication & Journalism.
- College of Liberal Arts School of Communication & Journalism
- Becoming Alabama: Who, What, When, Where, and Why: A Public Symposium on the Past, Present, and Future of the Press in Alabama
- Becoming Alabama: Immigration and Migration in a Deep South State
2009 - 2010 Breeden Scholar
Barb Bondy
Associate Professor in the College of Liberal Arts Department of Art & Art History. As part of her appointment, Bondy coordinated the first annual celebration of National Arts & Humanities Month at Auburn University.
- College of Liberal Arts Department of Art & Art History
- Arts & Humanities Month: Innovation Through Interdisciplinary Interaction
2009 Breeden Scholar
Dr. Howard Goldstein
Associate Professorin the College of Liberal Arts Department of Music. As part of his appointment, Dr. Goldstein coordinated performances, classroom instruction, and outreach activities for the Tasman String Quartet.
- College of Liberal Arts Department of Music
- 2009 Breeden Scholar Report