Anna Kendrick

Anna Kendrick

Class of 2009, Modern Europe
Clinical Assistant Professor of Literature and Director of Global Awards, NYU Shanghai
Anna Kendrick

Thesis Title: “On Guard with the Junipers”: Ewart Milne and Irish Literary Dissent in the Spanish Civil War

What Now: Clinical Assistant Professor of Literature and Director of Global Awards, New York University Shanghai

The transnational scope of a History & Literature degree has proved decisive for my own academic path. After Harvard, I spent a year teaching at the Shrewsbury School, Shropshire, UK, as the first female Harvard Fellow during the school's transition to co-education. Knowing that I wanted to carry on my Hist & Lit foundation with a graduate degree, I pursued an MPhil in European Literature at Cambridge, followed by a PhD with a Gates Cambridge Scholarship in the department of Spanish and Portuguese. My first monograph, Humanizing Childhood in Early Twentieth-Century Spain, examines how evolving representations of childhood and concrete collaborations in the field of education influenced Spain's early twentieth-century cultural vanguard before the Spanish Civil War. Aiming to carry forward my interest in reform education in my own work, I moved to Shanghai to teach European literature and direct the scholarship and fellowship program at New York University’s degree-granting campus there. Our Humanities program is small and highly individualized, which reminds me of what I loved about Hist & Lit: the ability to plan my own course of study, draw from classes across departments, bring new fascinations back from time abroad, and construct a thesis that brought all my explorations together. In these and many other ways, I seek to incorporate the intellectual creativity and care of a Hist & Lit degree into my teaching and scholarship today.