Edward J. Kenney

Biography Kenney was educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham, West Sussex. During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Corps of Signals in Britain and India. He then went on to read classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was awarded a BA in 1949.

After a brief spell as assistant lecturer at the University of Leeds, Kenney returned to Cambridge, first as a research fellow at Trinity College and from 1953 as a fellow of Peterhouse. In 1974, he was named the seventh Kennedy Professor of Latin, an appointment which he held until his retirement in 1982.

In addition to his post at Cambridge, Kenney has held visiting positions at Harvard and Berkeley. From 1959 to 1965 he served as the editor of Classical Quarterly, while the British Academy elected him to a fellowship in 1968. He was elected foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1976. In 1979, he wrote a Latin poem, parodying the first-century CE poet Ovid, on the centenary of the Hellenic Society, a British learned society specialising in classical studies.

He was known for his exacting but constructive criticism. When interviewing candidates for admittance to the college, he would assess them using the "Fufu test". His pet cat Fufu would be on the candidate's chair and they would be judged by the manner in which they treated it. The more kindly they treated the cat, the more likely they were to be admitted.