The University of Florida, Department of English


Associate Professor Kenneth Kidd received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He came to UF in 1998 after teaching for several years at Eastern Michigan University. Professor Kidd's research interests include nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature, gender studies/queer theory, and children's literature and media.

He regularly teaches undergraduate courses in children's literature, adolescent literature, and children's film, as well as graduate seminars such as "Disney and Its Discontents" and "Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature." He currently serves as the Graduate Coordinator for the Department of English. He especially welcomes inquiries about UF's graduate program in children's literature.

He is the author of Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (2004 from University of Minnesota Press), a cross-disciplinary study of discourses of boyhood in and around realistic fiction, self-help writing, film, and pop-psychoanalysis. With Sidney I. Dobrin he coedited the anthology Wild Things: Children's Culture and Ecocriticism (2004 from Wayne State University Press). He is currently developing a project on children's book awards and the American public sphere.

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[ ] Active in the MLA's Division on Children's Literature and the Children's Literature Association, Professor Kidd is also Associate Director of UF's Center for Children's Literature & Culture.