Dr. J. Gerald Kennedy

J. Gerald Kennedy is Boyd Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He retired from teaching in December 2015 but maintains an active research agenda. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, most recently Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford 2016). To support the writing of this book, he received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also co-edited The American Novel to 1870 for the Oxford History of the Novel in English. He was at the same time Advisory Editor for Vols. 1-3 of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (Cambridge). His earlier books include Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (Yale 1987) and Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (Yale 1993). His edition of the Penguin Portable Poe (2006) is used around the world.  Poe’s War on Terror, Kennedy’s current book project, explores the irrational culture of fear that has emerged with electronic global media, and it particularly investigates the media-driven social psychology of terrorism. Poe serves counter-intuitively as a guide to understanding terror, providing insights for managing individual fear as well as cultural panic. Kennedy will spend four weeks this summer as a Writing Residency Fellow at the Bellagio Center on Lake Como, where he will work on this project. He is also currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Edgar A. Poe.