Dennis Kennedy (born 1 November 1940, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States), is the Samuel Beckett Professor of Drama and Theatre (Emeritus) in Trinity College Dublin.
A widely published author of books on theatre, performance, and religion, he is also a playwright, director, and fiction writer.
Kennedy studied literature, philosophy, and history at the University of San Francisco and was active in the College Players.
His next post was shore duty in Pearl Harbor; he acted professionally in Honolulu during that time.
He did graduate work at Oxford and the University of California, Santa Barbara, receiving the PhD in 1972.
For a decade he taught literature and theatre at Grand Valley State in western Michigan.
Under the initiative of Michael Birtwistle he helped establish an alternative theatre in Grand Rapids, called Stage 3, where he acted, directed, wrote, and founded the Michigan New Plays Festival.
He spent two separate years researching in London and Oxford on fellowships from the US National Endowment for the Humanities.
Kennedy’s scholarly books on theatre and performance, published by Oxford and Cambridge university presses, brought a different type of recognition.
Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre, widely praised by John Gielgud and Peter Hall among others, re-evaluated the importance of England’s foundational director.
[1] Looking at Shakespeare, which reviewed design and the visual in twentieth-century production, argued that the meaning of performance is as dependent on what is seen as on what is spoken.
[3] By the time Shakespeare in Asia was released some fifteen years later, a shift from the Anglo-centred approach to England’s national poet had been broadly noted in scholarship and performance.
[4] In 1994 he was appointed the inaugural holder of the Samuel Beckett Chair of Drama and Theatre in Trinity College Dublin, where he remained until retirement.
[5] His book on audiences, entitled The Spectator and the Spectacle, consolidated his wide thinking about the nature of public reception in performance, and included studies of audiences for sport, TV game shows, museums, gambling, and religious ritual.
[6] In the theatre Kennedy directed many new plays as well as Shakespeare’s As You Like It in Beijing in 2005 and Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in Dublin in 2006.
His most recent book, Creating Jesus, a study of the gospel of Mark as literary and historical document, consolidated a life-long interest in the history of Christianity and its place in contemporary culture.
In 2021 he gave the opening address to the World Shakespeare Congress in Singapore, and he continues to lecture and present acting workshops around the globe.
They have three daughters: Miranda, an author and journalist in Washington, and the twins Jessica and Megan, who are dancers and co-artistic directors of Junk Ensemble, a dance-theatre troupe in Dublin.
Maria Helena Serôdio, João Almeida Flor, et al. Ribeirão: Húmas.