William John Kennedy

William J. Kennedy died on January 16, 2025 after a brief unexpected illness. He was surrounded by his loving family who shared light-hearted memories while listening to Cole Porter sing “You’re the Top.” To his wife, two children, four grandchildren, and close friends, Bill was the quintessential “top.” To Bill, his cherished family was his greatest achievement.

Bill was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn on April 26, 1942. He attended Brooklyn Prep where Daniel Berrigan taught him English, and Joe Paterno tried to recruit him for the football team until Bill asked, “Is that the game where you bat the puck into the hoop and call it a touchdown?” Bill loved to brag about his contemporary Brooklynites: “Barbra Streisand and I were born a day apart, in the same year, in the same hospital”; “Look at Tony Fauci in this yearbook photo. He’s the really short guy on the Regis basketball team.” 

Bill was an inveterate New Yorker. He could identify every side street, crack, crevice, and movie theater in Brooklyn and Manhattan. On a walk around the city, he could make what was there before more believable than what is there now: “That building used to be the Roxy. I recall the amazing show for ‘Bus Stop,’ in which the Roxy hauled out its entire repertoire of sets for constantly shifting scene changes while the Ice Blades and Roxyettes skated on and on. At one point, the cyclorama rose to reveal the rear stage wall, disclosing the theater’s odd triangular ground plan— a stunning revelation to me at the time.” At the time, Bill was 14. 

Bill earned a B.A. in Classical and Modern Languages at Manhattan College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Yale University. During his years at Yale, he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Danforth Fellow. In 2015 he received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Manhattan College, which prompted friends to refer to him as “Doctor Doctor.” To distinguish himself from the many Bills and Wills in the Kennedy family and to amuse the baristas shouting out his cappuccino order at Gimme, Bill called himself “Elmo,” after Guglielmo and the puppet.

Bill was the Avalon Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Cornell University where he taught the history of European literature and literary criticism from antiquity to the early modern period. His publications focus on Italian, French, English, and German texts from Dante to Milton. He was the author of Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (Yale UP 1978); Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (UP of New England, 1983), recipient of the MLA's Marraro Prize; Authorizing Petrarch (Cornell UP, 1994); The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England (Johns Hopkins UP, 2003); and Petrarchism at Work: Contextual Economies in the Age of Shakespeare (Cornell UP, 2016), and he co-edited a rhetoric textbook, Writing in the Disciplines (Prentice-Hall, seventh ed. 2012). He also contributed over sixty articles on literature, rhetoric, and literary theory to various journals and critical collections. At the time of his death, he was completing Comparable Shakespeare, a book-length study focusing upon Shakespeare’s impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, drama, poetry, and film in Russia, Germany, Italy, India, North Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Japan.

Bill joined the nascent Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell in 1970. Over the years, he served as the department’s Chair and Acting Chair as well as Acting Chair of the Russian Literature Department and Acting Chair of Medieval Studies. During one of his stints as Department Chair in the 1980s, he steered the approval of a formal Major in Comparative Literature to completion in the College of Arts and Sciences. Bill was the recipient of numerous Cornell awards; fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Liguria Foundations; two MLA book awards; and in 2021 a crowning honor: The Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement Award from the Renaissance Society of America. 

Off the Cornell campus, Bill was Invited Visiting Lecturer, Littérature Anglaise, Université Paul Vallery, Montpellier, France; Invited Visiting Professor, Comparative Literature, New York University; and twice invited Visiting Professor, Foreign Languages, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China.

To all who knew him, Bill was warm and welcoming, wise and witty, and wonderful. To his colleagues, he was a generous mentor and a supportive friend. Tracy McNulty said, “Bill was one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I've ever met, and I benefitted personally so much—as I'm sure most of my colleagues did as well—from his generous mentorship, esprit de corps, and warmth as a human being.” Tim Murray says, “I can’t think of another colleague as eager to stop in his tracks to warmly greet his colleagues and engage in a brief update.” “I loved his sense of humor (the ties as a belt!!),” says Debbie Castillo, “and his great quality of smoothing over troubled waters.” Giulia Andreoni says, “Bill was not only a mentor but also an exceptional individual—both a brilliant scholar and a truly wonderful person. His kindness, thoughtfulness, and encouragement made a lasting impact on everyone fortunate enough to know him. His support made a world of difference in my life.” Claudia Lazarro remembers Bill as “a mentor, a friend, a sympathetic ear, a generous exchanger of ideas, and a model of what an academic could and should be.” Anindita Banerjee sums up Bill Kennedy: “So much personal generosity at all kinds of magnitudes and scales, places and times. And a true Renaissance man who unstintingly shared his magnificent intellect with everyone before him.”

Bill is survived by his loving wife, Mary Lynch Kennedy; his beloved children, Liam Lynch Kennedy (Barbara Argyropoulos) and Maura Kennedy-Smith (Bill); his adored grandchildren, Nikoletta, Ronan, Andreas, Esme; and many lifelong friends, including Kathleen Murnion who introduced Bill and Mary 62 years ago when he played Creon to Kathleen’s Antigone. The three friends acted in many college plays together, and Bill continued to act in local theater productions during his first decades in Ithaca. During those years, he had a TV show, “Box Office Bill,” on the local TV station and he also reviewed films for local papers. In the Kennedy household, Grandpa or Papou Bill’s favorite activity was showing a classic movie to the grandkids in his basement theater. Bill is also survived by a staggering collection of DVDs, Blu-rays, and (yes) VHS tapes, playbills, opera programs, books, wine, and neckties. Please honor him by watching your favorite film, sharing the magic with loved ones around you, and sitting through all the credits. 

Bill would not want to be mourned but rather to be celebrated. An event is planned for the spring.