Kellenberger, Hunter

Hunter Kellenberger (1904-1975), professor of French and chairman of the Modern Languages Division, was born in Newark, Ohio, on February 14, 1904. He graduated from Kenyon College in 1925 and received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton in 1928 and 1931. He was master in Latin and Greek at the DeVeau School from 1925 to 1927, and master in French at the Northwood School from 1931 to 1933. In 1933-34 he was Traveling Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He taught at Princeton before coming to Brown in 1938 as assistant professor of French. He was promoted to associate professor in 1946 and professor in 1947. He was chairman of the Division of Modern Languages from 1946 until 1960, when the division was divided into separate departments, after which he was chairman of the Department of French Studies from 1960 to 1964 and chairman of the new Council on Languages and Literature from 1960 to 1963. His interests were in French stylistics, French literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with emphasis on theatre and Voltaire. He published The Influence of Accentuation on French Word Order in 1932, and contributed the chapter on “Modern Languages” in the Case for Basic Education, published in 1958. He was chairman of the first Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, which was held at Brown in 1954. He retired in 1971 and died on April 12, 1975 in Providence.