Vartan Gregorian was born in 1934 in Iran. He received a Bachelor of Arts in history from Stanford University and his PhD in history and humanities from Stanford in 1964. Gregorian taught European and Middle Eastern history at San Francisco State College, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Texas at Austin.
In 1972, Gregorian joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty and was appointed Tarzian Professor of History and professor of South Asian history. He was founding dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 and four years later became its twenty-third provost until 1981.
From 1981 to 1989, Gregorian served as president of the New York Public Library. He then served for nine years as the sixteenth president of Brown University, where he led a five-year capital campaign called the Campaign for the Rising Generation, which at the time was the most ambitious capital campaign in Brown's history, and for the state of Rhode Island. Since 1997, he has served as the twelfth president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, a grant-making institution founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1911.
Gregorian delivered the Beatty Lecture on November 16, 2000, titled "Libraries and Reading in the Computer Age".
Download a PDF of Vartan Gregorian's lecture transcript
here.
Transcript: Â鶹AV Archives
image: Carnegie Corporation of New York
