Graduating with a Masters of Arts in 1992, the following year he joined the faculty in anthropology at City College of San Francisco, where he taught until 2017.
He is presently host and curator of the CinemaLit Film Series of the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute.
[3] Kennedy's books include Marie Dressler: A Biography (1999), Edmund Goulding’s Dark Victory: Hollywood’s Genius Bad Boy with a foreword by Kevin Brownlow (2004), Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes (2007), Roadshow!
In reviewing Joan Blondell, film critic and historian Leonard Maltin wrote, "Kennedy is a genuinely good writer who knows the language as well as he does vintage Hollywood movies.
... this book finally does this fabulous star justice with comprehensive research on her now-obscured early life; loving, intelligent coverage of all her extant films; savvy, well-written documentation of her stage career, and endlessly perceptive reconstruction of what Dressler was like as a human being....