Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University
William J. Kennedy teaches the history of European literature and literary criticism from antiquity to the early modern period. His interests focus on Italian, French, English, and German texts from Dante to Milton. His Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (Yale University Press, 1978) studies interactions of genre, style, and mode in lyric, epic, and prose narrative. His Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (University Press of New England, 1983), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize, traces the rise of modern pastoral from ancient models. His Authorizing Petrarch (Cornell University Press, 1994) explores the canonizing imitations of that poet's work throughout Europe. His most recent book is The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He has co-edited a rhetoric textbook, Writing in the Disciplines (Prentice-Hall, fifth ed. 2003), and has contributed articles on the history of rhetoric and literary theory to journals and critical collections. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. His current book-length project focuses on figurations of economic exchange and transaction in early modern European poetry.