Brian Kennelly was elected to the Modern Language Association of America (http://www.mla.org/)'s Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee (2008 -2011) at the 2007 MLA convention and has been awarded a Modern Language Association Bibliography Fellowship (2008-11). He was a Table Leader at the 2008 Advanced Placement reading in French and an Assistant Examiner for the 2008 International Baccalaureat (French B). He currently serves on the College Board (http://www.collegeboard.com/)'s Advanced Placement French Language Curriculum Development & Assessment Committee and is working as a module developing consultant for VizCommunication (http://www.vizcommunication.com/). He continues to publish on authors who write or have written in a variety of genres and remains committed to integrating concepts across different disciplines. Because it is important to reflect with colleagues on what takes place in the classroom, he has considered in print how interdisciplinarity in French Studies, on the one hand, and the reading process, on the other, might be showcased in a meaningful and pedagogically-sound way. Hence his published work on the teaching of contemporary Francophone political, sociological, scientific, and linguistic issues as well as a recent article on reading differently and rereading for difference in the hermetic poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. Likewise, he has pursued questions of identity, whether those rooted in sexuality, those represented in personal advertisements, online, and in fiction, or those extending beyond—if not broaching—national or regional contexts. What are the personal stakes involved in making literature face up to the truth of its metaphors of seduction? How does author Renaud Camus recontextualize, actualize, and literalize the literary in the political? What does the rewriting of a novel by Tony Duvert focusing on the mobile nature of homosexual identity reveal about the extent of the simultaneously sexual and textual quest it rehearses? And how does the Afrikaner-Parisian Breyten Breytenbach nuance, extend, and complicate in his writings the ongoing debate in South Africa and beyond over Afrikaner cultural identity? He looks forward to the following: presenting "Swart Poes as Black Honey? Miscegenation and (Mis)Representation in Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior" at West Virginia University's Thirty-Second Colloqium on Literature and Film; presenting "Intellectual GPS" at the 10 October day-long colloqium at Cal Poly, "Putting Knowledge to Work: Building an IR for Your Campus" (http://www.lib.calpoly.edu/digitalcommons/ir2008/); presiding over a rountable session on academic freedom where featured panelists will include Mark Bauerlein (Emory University), Norma Cantú (University of Texas, San Antonio), David Horowitz (David Horowitz Freedom Center), and Cary Nelson (University of Illinois); and presenting “Pas ça: Pédhomophilie and/as Perversion in Tony Duvert’s Quand mourut Jonathan” in Spring 2009 as part of the Women's and Gender Studies Faculty Lecture Series (http://www.calpoly.edu/%7Ewomst/news.htm). In addition to Edifice Rex (bits and pieces) and Fashioning the Curve (a novel), Kennelly is at work on Texts that Kill, his second 'academic' book.
Refereed Articles
Reading Differently, Rereading for Difference in Versions of Rimbaud's "Mouvement", Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics (2007)
How to engage students to reread Arthur Rimbaud’s 1886 poem “Mouvement” differently? What can they...
Beauty in Bastardy? Breytenbach on Afrikaans and the Afrikaners, PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (2005)
Throughout the twentieth century activists in South Africa for the Afrikaans language struggled with, yet...
Rewriting, Rereading Récidive, Dalhousie French Studies (2004)
Author of some dozen works of homoerotic fiction, two polemical essays, and recipient of the...
Truth and Consequences: Renaud Camus and the Personal, Dalhousie French Studies (2002)
A year before his untimely death in 1980, in the days before the internet, before...
Caught in/On the Web: To Publish Without Perishing in the Digital Age, First Monday (2000)
Publishing online is an increasingly prevalent means for scholars to test their ideas. But what...