• Photo courtesy University of North Carolina
  • Date of Birth: November 26, 1928
  • Born City: Hartford
  • Born State/Country: CT
  • Parents: George and Ethel Hall K.
  • Date of Death: July 28, 2022
  • Death City: Spring
  • Death State/Country: TX
  • Married: Mary Lee Hunnicutt, March 25,1955.
  • Education:

    A.B. Princeton, 1950; A.M. Harvard, 1952; Ph.D., 1954; travelling fell., 1954-5.

  • Professional Experience:

    Instr. & Tutor, classics, history, literature, Harvard, 1955-8; Secretary of Classics faculty, 1955-8; Board of Freshman Advisers, 1956-8; vis. asst. prof., summer, 1959; asst, prof. Greek, Haverford, 1958-9; asst. prof. classics, 1959-63; asso. prof. 1963-5; Fulbright Fellow & Guggenheim Fellow, 1964-5; prof. classics, U. of North Carolina, 1966-72; chair, Department of Classics, 1966-76; Paddison Professor of Classics, 1972-95; chair, Department of Linguistics, 1975-6; chair, U. Faculty, 1985-8; chair, comparative literature, 1989-93; board of governors, UNC Press, 968-90; chair, 1973-88; mnging comm., ASCSA, 1959-93; exec. Comm., 1976-80; publications comm., 1981-4; vis. prof., U. Pennsylvania, summer, 1963; advisory council, AAR,1963-83; Fellowship Selection Committee, 1968-9; trustee, 1978-80; Board of Directors, APA, 1979-73; president, 1978-9; del. to ACLS, 1980-3; Goodwin Award, APA, 1975; Johns Hopkins Centennial Scholar, 1976; fell., AAAS, 1978; NEH Research Fellow & Fellow, Dumbarton Oaks, 1979-80; member, National Humanities Council, NEH, 1980-7; chair, Committee on Research, 1982-5; vice-chair of Council, 1983-5; chair, Budget Committee, 1983-5; chair, Jefferson Lecture Committee, 1984-5; vis. prof. U. Colorado, Summer, 1982; memb., AmPhSoc, 1984; Chairman, Sutheastern Region Selection Committee, Mellon Graduate Fellowships in the Humanities, 1984-7, 1988-9; Membre de bureau, Fédération International des Associations des Études Classiques, 1985-94; vice president, 1989-94; memb. Council, International Society for the History of Rhetoric, 1977-87; vice president, 1979-83; president, 1983-5; Lewin Distinguished Vis. Prof., Washington U., St. Louis, Spring 1988; editor, AJP,  1989-94; hon. ed., 1994; sr. fellow, CHS, 1990-5; Christian Gauss Award Panel, Phi Beta Kappa, 1991-3; Distinguished Scholar Award, Speech Communication Association, 1992; NEH Fellowship for University Teachers, 1994-5; fac. affiliate in Speech Communication, Colorado State U., 1994-2002; fellow, Rhetoric Society of America, 2006.

  • Publications:

    “Theophrastus and Stylistic Distinctions,” HSCP 62 (1957) 92-104; “The Ancient Dispute over Rhetoric in Homer,” AJP78 (1957) 23-35; “The Oratory of Andocides,” AJP 79 (1958) 32-43; “Isocrates’ Encomium of Helen: A Panhellenic Document.” TAPA 89 (1958) 77-83; “Aristotle on the Period,” HSCP 80 (1959) 169-78; “Focusing of Arguments in Greek Deliberative Oratory,” TAPA 90 (1959): 131-38; “An Estimate of Quintilian,” AJP 83 (1962): 130-46; The Art of Persuasion in Greece. (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1963); “Non-Western Studies: A Challenge to the Classics” CJ 58(1963) 157-9; “Two Problems in the Historical Study of Rhetoric.” Pennsylvania Speech Annual 21 (1964) 17-22; “Speech Education in Greece.” Western Speech 31 (1967): 2-9; “Crassus, Cicero, and Caplan.” Addresses delivered at the meeting honoring Professor Harry Caplan. Speeches delivered in Washington, D.C., at a meeting of the Speech Communication Association (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1967); “The Oratorical Career of Demosthenes,” in Demosthenes’ On the Crown, ed. J. J. Murphy (New York: Random House, 1967) 28-47 (Reprint of The Art of Persuasion in Greece, pp. 208-29.); “Antony’s Speech at Caesar’s Funeral.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 54 (1968): 99-106; “The Rhetoric of Advocacy in Greece and Rome,” AJP 89 (1968): 419-36; Quintilian. Twayne’s World Authors Series 66 (New York: Twayne, 1969); “The Shadow of Isocrates.” Colorado Journal of Educational Research 2 (1972) 16-23; “Apuleius,” “Homer,” “Iliad,” and “Odyssey”: articles in The World Book Encyclopedia (Chicago: Field Enterprises, 1972, et seq.); “A Reading List on the Classical Humanities,” Humanities (22.5) (Washington: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1972); The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World: 300 B.C.-A.D. 300 (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1972);  “Gorgias.” (trans.) in The Older Sophists, ed. Rosamond K. Sprague (Columbia: U. of South Carolina Press, 1972) 30-47 (repr. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001 & as “Gorgias”/“Encomium of Helen,” in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, ed. Patricia Bizzell & Bruce Herzberg (Boston: Bedford Books, 1990) 38-42; Careers for Classicists. Pamphlet, APA, 1972; rev. ed. with Laura Barnard, 1976; “Introduction” in The Speeches in Thucydides,edited by Philip A. Stadter (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1973) 1-7; “The Sophists as Declaimers” in Approaches to the Second Sophistic: Papers delivered at the 105th Meeting Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association, ed. G. W. Bowersock (American Philological Association, 1974) 17-22; “A Selective Bibliography of the Second Sophistic,” with Mark Barnard in Approaches to the Second Sophistic, ed G. W. Bowersock (American Philological Association, 1974) 30-42; “The Present State of the Study of Ancient Rhetoric.” CP 70 (1975): 278-82; “Classical Influences on The Federalist” in Classical Traditions in Early America, ed. J. W. Eadie (Ann Arbor: Center for Coordination of Ancient and Modern Studies, 1976) 119-38; Chapter 9 in A Composite Translation of a Life of George Washington in Latin Prose, by Francis Glass, ed. John F. Latimer (Washington, D.C.: George Washington U., 1976) 35-9; “Toward a Methodology for Study of Classics in America” in The Usefulness of Classical Learning in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Susan F. Wiltshire (American Philological Association, 1977) 3-5; “A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War” in special issue: “The Classical Tradition in the South,” Southern Humanities Review (1977) 21-5; “Encolpius and Agamemnon in Petronius,” AJP 99 (1978): 171-78; Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1980; 2nd ed., revised, 1998; Slovenian trans. as Klasicna retorika ter njen krscanska in posvetna traadicija od antike do sodobnosti, ed. Nada Groselj (Ljubljana: Zalozba ZRC, 2001; Spanish trans. as La Retórica Clasica y su Traducion Cristiana y Secular, desde La Antiguëdad hasta Nuestros Días, ed. Luisa Lopez Grigera (Logrono: Institute de Estudios Riojanos, 2003); “Later Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 13 (1980): 181-97; “Gildersleeve, the Journal, and Philology in America,” AJP 101 (1980) 1-11; repr. with some changes as in Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve: An American Classicist, ed.  Ward W. Briggs & Herbert W. Benario (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1986) 42-9; Greek Rhetoric under Christian Emperors(Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1983); “Classical and Christian Source Criticism” in The Relationship among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. William O. Walker. Trinity U. Monograph Series in Religion 5 (San Antonio: Trinity U. Press, 1983) 125-55; “The Classical Tradition in Rhetoric.” Pp. 20-34 in Byzantium and Classical Tradition(Birmingham: Center for Byzantine Studies, 1981) 20-34; “Quintilian” in Ancient Writers, Greece and Rome, ed. T.J. Luce (New York: Scribner’s, 1982) 943-59; New Testament Interpretation through Rhetorical Criticism (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1984; Span. trans. by Federico de Carlos Otto, as Retórica y Nuevo Testamento, Madrid: Ediciones Cristiana, 2003; Ital. trans. Donatella Zoroddy as Nuovo Testamento e critica retorica, Brescia: Paideia Editrice, 2006); “An Introduction to the Rhetoric of the Gospels.” Rhetorica 1 (1983) 17-23; “Afterword: An Essay on Classics in America since the Yale Report” in Classica Americana, ed. Meyer Reinhold (Detroit: Wayne State U. Press, 1984) 325-51; “Forms and Functions of Latin Speech” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. G. Mallory Masters, Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina 10 (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1984).45-73; “Sophists and Physicians of the Greek Enlightenment” and “Oratory” in The Cambridge History of Greek Literature, ed. P. Easterling & B. M. W. Knox (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1985) 472-7, 498-526; “Helen’s Web Unraveled,” Arethusa 19 (1986) 7 44; “Helen’s Husbands and Lovers: A Query,” CJ 82 (1987) 152-3; “The Story of Helen: Myth and Rhetoric,” Inaugural lecture as Lewin Visiting Distinguished Professor, published as a pamphlet St. Louis: Washington U., 1987); “Fin de siècle Classicism: Henry Adams and Thorstein Veblen; Lew Wallace and W. D. Howells,” CML 8 (1987) 15-21; “The Rhetorica of Guillaume Fichet (1471),” Rhetorica 5 (1987) 411-18; “Some Reflections on Neomodernism,” Rhetoric Review 6 (1988) 213-16; “Process or Content? Language or Literature? The Future of the Latin Curriculum,” North Carolina Classical Association Newsletter, special issue (1988): 1-4; “Quintilian on Early Childhood Education,” Primus 1.2 (1988) 4-9; A Woman’s Version of the Faust Legend: George Sand’s Seven Strings of the Lyre. Introduction, English Translation, and Notes (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1989); “Brief Mention” AJP, 1989-94; “Foreword” to Frank Witt Hughes, Early Christian Rhetoric and 2ndThessalonians (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1989) 7-8; General Editor, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.Volume I: Classical Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1989) and “Preface,” Chapter 2: “Language and Meaning in Archaic and Classical Greece,” Chapter 5: “The Evolution of a Theory of Artistic Prose,” Chapter 6: “Hellenistic Literary and Philosophical Scholarship,” and Chapter 11: “Christianity and Criticism,” ix-xv, 78-91, 184-99; 200-14, 330-46; “Truth and Rhetoric in the Pauline Epistles” in The Bible as Rhetoric, ed. Martin Warner. Warwick Studies in Philosophy and Literature (London: Routledge, 1990) 195-202; “Classics and Canons,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (1990) 217-25 (repr. in The Politics of Liberal Education, ed. Darryl Gless & Barbara H. Johnson (Durham: Duke U. Press, 1992) 223-31); “The Rhetoric of the Early Christian Liturgy.” in Language and the Worship of the Church, ed. David and R. C. D. Jasper (London: Macmillan, 1990) 26-43; “The Roman Tradition in Rhetoric” in Retorikk, ed. Øvind Andersen (Trondheim Universitetet, 1990) 41-51; “Rhetoric and Society: Some Comparative Evidence,” Carolinas Speech Communication Annual 6 (1990) 7-13; 

    Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. with intro., notes & appendices (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1991; 2nd ed. rev., 2006); “Running a Locomotive in 1856: The Log of H. S. Haines,” Railroad History 146 (1991) 86-93; “A Hoot in the Dark: The Evolution of General Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992) 1-21 (repr. in Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries, ed. William A. Covino & David A. Jolliffe, New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1995; “Chapter IV: Rhetoric” in The Heritage of Rome, ed. Richard Jenkyns (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1992) 269-94; “Response” in Rhetoric in the Vortex of Cultural Studies: Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Conference, ed. Arthur Walzer (Minneapolis: Rhetoric Society of America, 1993) 244-6; A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1994); “Shifting Visions of Classical Paradigms: The ‘Same’ and the ‘Other’, ” IJCT 1 (1994) 1-16; “Visions of Beauty: The Western Rhetorical Tradition,” in Proceedings of the XLIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Tokyo: U. of Tokyo Press, 1995) 284-90; “Reworking Aristotle’s Rhetoric” in Theory, Text, Context, ed. Christopher L. Johnstone (Albany: State U. of New York Press, 1996) 169-84; Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1997 [1998]); Two Greek Rhetorical Treatises from the Roman Empire. Introduction, Text, and Translation of the Arts of Rhetoric attributed to Anonymous Seguerianus and Apsines of Gadara (in collaboration with Mervin R. Dilts). Mnemosyne Supplement 168 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); “Reading Disraeli with Stendhal” in Narrative Ironies, ed. Raymond A. Prier & Gerald Gillespie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997) 253-66; “The Contributions of Rhetoric to Literary Criticism,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism,Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1997) 349-64; “Historical Survey of Rhetoric” (Chapter 1) and “The Genres of Rhetoric” (Chapter 2) in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, 330 B.C.-A.D. 400, ed. Stanley E. Porter (Leiden: Brill, 1997) 3-50; The Latin Iliad: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Notes (Fort Collins, CO, 1998); “Foreword” to English trans. of Heinrich Lausberg’s Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, ed. David E. Orton & R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998) xix-xxi; “Rhetoric and Culture/Rhetoric and Technology” (Selections from the Charles Kneupper Memorial Lecture for the Rhetorical Society of America, 1998) in Rhetoric, the Polls, and the Global Village, ed. C. Jan Swearingen (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999) 55-61; “Quintilian on Retirement” in Quintiliano: Historia y Actualidad de la Retorica, vol. 1, ed. Tomas Albaladejo and Emilio del Rio Sanz. (Logrono: Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1998) 151-8; “The Origin of the Concept of a Canon and Its Application to the Greek and Latin Classics” in Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, ed. Jan Gorak (New York: Garland, 2000) 105-16; “Classical Rhetoric,” “Comparative Rhetoric,” and “Imitation” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2001) 92-115, 137-43, 381-4; “Rhetoric” in The International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. N. J. Smelse & Paul B. Baltes (Oxford: Elsevier. Science, 2001) 13.317-13.323; “Cicero’s Oratorical and Rhetorical Legacy” in Brill’s Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric, ed. James M. May (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 481-501; Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric, Translated into English, with Introductions and Notes. WGRW 10 (Atlanta & Leiden: Society of Biblical Literature/Brill, 2003); “Brief Mention: Some Recent Controversies in the Study of Later Greek Rhetoric” AJP 124 (2003): 295-301; “Electrifying Rhetoric of 1906,” Newsletter of the Railroad and Locomotive Historical Society 23.3 (2003): 3-8; Fictitious Authors and Imaginary Novels in French, English, and American Fiction, from the 18th to the Start of the 21st Century (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005); Invention and Method: Two Rhetorical Treatises from the Hermogenic Corpus. WGRW 15 (Atlanta & Leiden: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005/Brill, 2006); short articles on the history of nine North Carolina railroads in the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, ed. William Powell (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 2006); Translation of chapter 6 of Aspects de la logographie judiciaire antique by M. Lavency (1964) as “The Written Plea of the Logographer” in The Attic Orators, ed. Edwin Carawan (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2007) 32-6; “Roman Declamation in the Generation after Quintilian,” (review article) IJCT 13 (2007) 592-97; “Choricius of Gaza, Declamation 8, “A Spartan Citizen,” and Declamation 12, “An Orator,” (trans.) in Rhetorical Exercises from Late Antiquity. A Translation of Choricius of Gaza’s Preliminary Talks and Declamations, ed. Robert Panella (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2009) 158-76, 241-60.

    Festchriften: Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy, ed. Duane F. Watson, Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 50 (Sheffield: JSOT Press/Sheffield Academic, 1991); The Orator in Action & Theory in Greece & Rome: Essays in Honor of George A. Kennedy, ed. Cecil W. Wooten, Mnemosyne Supplement 225 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2001); Words Well Spoken: George Kennedy’s Rhetoric of the New Testament, ed. C. Clifton Black & Duane F. Watson (Waco, TX: Baylor U. Press, 2008) with curriculum vitae, 193-203.