- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2011
Professor Kenny's first academic positions were as Frances A. Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute (1985-1987), Stipendiary Lecturer at New College Oxford (1987-1989), and Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London (1989-1994). He then taught in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge for many years (1994-2012), before going to Oxford.
His main research area is the literature and thought of 16th- and 17th-century France. Professor Kenny has long been interested in how different kinds of knowledge were shaped and communicated by literary forms in general and by language in particular. His work on language first focused on 'concepts' (in particular that of curiosity) and then on 'tenses' (and the attitudes they communicate towards the dead).
His recent and current research is on the relationship of literature and learning to social hierarchy in early modern Europe, especially France. It explores connections between literary and intellectual history on the one hand and social history on the other.
He also works in the field of language policy as a member of various bodies, including the Academy’s Languages Executive Group.
Current post
All Souls College, Oxford Senior Research Fellow
Past appointments
Department of French, University of Cambridge Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader
1994 - 2012
Publications
Literature, Learning, and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern Europe
Published in 2022
Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France
Published in 2020 by Oxford University Press
La Librairie de Montaigne
co-edited by Neil Kenny and Philip Ford - Published in 2012
Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France
Neil Kenny - Published in 2015 by Oxford University Press
An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century French Literature and Thought: Other Times, Other Places
Neil Kenny - Published in 2008 by Duckworth
The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany
Neil Kenny - Published in 2004 by Oxford University Press
Curiosity in Early Modern Europe: Word Histories
Neil Kenny - Published in 1998 by O. Harrassowitz
The Palace of Secrets: Béroalde de Verville and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge
Neil Kenny - Published in 1991 by Oxford University Press
(ed.) Philosophical Fictions and the French Renaissance
Neil Kenny - Published in 1991 by Warburg Institute
Nine Fellows of the British Academy on how their subjects could shape the 2020s
24 Jan 2020
Leading professors in the humanities and social sciences set out the challenges and opportunities facing their subjects in the 2020s.
