Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Like other members of the Ivy League, it is known for prestige, academic rigor and selective undergraduate admissions process. Among its peers, Brown is noted for a culture of campus activism and longstanding commitment to academic and intellectual freedom exemplified by its Open Curriculum and course "shopping period." The university has been described as the "progressive Ivy," "hip Ivy," and "creative Ivy."
Brown is consistently referenced in popular culture, including in works of cinema, television, music, and the written word.
Faculty
Josiah Carberry – Professor of Psychoceramics (the study of cracked pots), who was created as a joke in 1929 and who has become a tradition at Brown. On every Friday the 13th, cracked pots are left around the Brown campus for students to deposit their pocket change. The money goes to support the Brown University library. Traditionally, Brown alums everywhere send their pocket change to the library on Friday the 13th. There is an organization of alums called "Friends of Josiah" that meets for dinner on the Brown campus on Friday the 13th.
Literature
Eric van der Woodsen – in the book series Gossip Girl written by Cecily von Ziegesar, Eric is a student at Brown University. In Hannah Lillith Assadi's novel Sonora, the protagonist's unnamed manager, drops out of Brown Andrea Sachs – The main character in the 2003 novel The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger. Jeffrey Eugenides's 2011 novel The Marriage Plot centers on the lives of three Brown students The 1924 novel The Plastic Age by Brown professor Percy Marks depicted a thinly disguised version of Brown. The novel depicted or suggested a campus of hazing, smoking, drinking, partying, and "petting." The book was the second best-selling novel of 1924, and turned into a film of the same name. Marina Thwaite, Danielle Minkoff and Julian Clarke, characters from Claire Messud's 2006 novel The Emperor's Children, were all friends at Brown University. In Akhil Sharma's 2014 novel Family Life, the narrator, Ajay, is rejected from Brown David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest includes a description of a ludicrously botched attempt to fix a Brown–Yale basketball game, which has consequences for main character Don Gately. The character Geoffrey Day graduated magna cum laude from Brown, where he experienced an episode of depression in his second year. In H. P. Lovecraft's short story ''The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), the narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, writes that his grandfather, George Gammell Angell, was "Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island."
Film and television
Nathan Huffner (Rick Moranis) wears a Brown University T-shirt in the 1989 movie Parenthood The Sopranos: Season 2 episode "The Happy Wanderer" begins with a Brown admission officer's visit to Meadow's high school; he notes that "admission is extremely selective" Sean Alvarez (played by Andre DaSilva), honest stock broker and murder victim on Law & Order, 2000 episode "Trade This" (season 11), produced by Jeffrey L. Hayes, Brown '66.
Sabrina Anderson / Sabrina Jordan (played by Spencer Locke) – young woman held hostage during a robbery who, as a result, must enter witness protection and will not be able to go to Brown where her old friends will recognize her, on In Plain Sight – 2010 (season 3) episode "WitSec Stepmother"
Sam Arsenault (played by James Naughton, Brown '67) – guest villain on Damages (2006–7). In one episode, he sings Danny Boy at a cocktail party, telling the guests he sang it with the Jabberwocks when he was an undergraduate student at Brown. Jim was, in fact, a member of the Jabberwocks when he was an undergraduate at Brown.
Ann August (played by Natalie Portman) – central character in Anywhere but Here; daughter of Adele August (played by Susan Sarandon). Ann applies and is accepted to Brown, much to her mother's dismay over the distance. Guinevere Beck (played by Elizabeth Lail) – Central character on You, an MFA student who went to Brown for her undergraduate education In BoJack Horseman season 2, film director Kelsey Jannings is quoted as saying, of her daughter Irving: “Indie darling daughters don’t go to Brown, okay? They end up at cute, little pat-on-the-back factories like Vassar, and then they move back in with their indie darling mothers and make weird puppet shows with their tampons and get a profile in New York Magazine, and the horrible cycle continues.”
Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) – lead character of the HBO romantic sitcom Sex and the City