Prof. Dane Kennedy

BIOGRAPHY

Dane Kennedy taught courses in British imperial, modern British, and world history before retiring in 2021. He is the author of eight books, the most recent being Mungo Park’s Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa (2024). Others include The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire (2018), Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013). He has also edited or co-edited three others, including How Empire Shaped Us (2016) and Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World (2013). Kennedy was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003-04 and a National Humanities Center Fellowship in 2010-11. He served as director of the National History Center from 2014 to 2020 and president of the North American Conference of British Studies from 2011 to 2013. For the past few years, he has been a contributing member of the annual international seminar, “Historizing the Refugee Experience.”