Professor Neil Kenny
Professor of French
BA, DPhil, FBA
Senior Research Fellow since 2012
I mainly work on the literary, social, and intellectual history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. My current work is on the early modern relation between literature and learning on the one hand, and social hierarchy on the other. Previous projects on encyclopaedism, curiosity, and posthumous presence investigated how different kinds of knowledge and belief were represented, and in particular how they were shaped by language.
Through the British Academy I am involved in work on language policy within education and society.
- Senior Research Fellow, All Souls College (from 2012)
- Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, then, from 2005, Reader, Department of French, University of Cambridge (from 1994 to 2012)
- Lecturer in French, Queen Mary, University of London (from 1989 to 1994)
- Stipendiary Lecturer in French, New College, Oxford (from 1987 to 1989)
- Frances A. Yates Fellow, Warburg Institute, University of London (from 1985 to 1987)
- Postgraduate, St John's College, Oxford (from 1982 to 1985)
- English Assistant, Collège Calvin, Geneva (from 1981 to 1982)
- Undergraduate, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (from 1978 to 1981)
- Literature, thought, society and culture in France and other parts of Europe, especially c. 1530-1650
- The relation of literature and learning to social hierarchy
- Montaigne
- The role of various dimensions of language (e.g. concept-formation; tense) in the shaping of knowledge and belief
- Advisory Board, Renaissance Studies (from 2007)
- Editorial Board, Research Monographs in French Studies, Legenda (from 2007 to 2020)
- Co-Editor, French Studies (from 2008 to 2012)
- Advisory Board, French Studies (from 2013)
- Advisory Board, Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Durham University (from 2015)
- Editorial Board, Early Modern Cultural Studies (book series), Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto, with Brepols (from 2016)
- Lead Fellow for Languages, British Academy (from 2017)
- Editorial Board, Renaissance Quarterly (from 2019)
- Advisory Board, Nottingham French Studies (from 2019)
- Graduate research training in modern languages
- Doctoral supervision on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature, thought, and culture
- British Academy Research Readership (from 1998 to 2000).
- Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (from 2010 to 2012).