Jules David Prown Oral History Project recordings and transcripts

Jules David Prown earned his Bachelor’s degree at Lafayette College (1951), an MA in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware (1956), and an MA (1953) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1961). He was a fellow in the Winterthur Program from 1954-1956. Prown was appointed the Edward R. Bacon Art Scholar at Harvard and completed his dissertation on the formative years of American painter John Singleton Copley. Prown served as Assistant to the Director of the Fogg Art Museum between 1959 and 1961. In 1961, he joined Yale University as an instructor, and he served as curator of Garvan and related collections of American Art at the Yale University Art Gallery from 1963 to 1968. He became Assistant Professor at Yale in 1964 and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship from 1964-1965. He was a Visiting Lecturer at Smith College from 1966-1967 and was promoted to Associate Professor at Yale in 1967. He became Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art in 1971, and retired from this position emeritus in 1999.

Prown served as the founding Director of the Yale Center for British Art from July 1968 to January 1976. He was influential while the Center was being planned in choosing Louis Kahn as the architect.

Karen Denavit has served as the Information Analyst at the Yale Center for British Art since 2008.