George Lyman Kittredge - at Harvard

At Harvard

Kittredge joined the faculty at Harvard as an instructor in autumn of 1888, was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1890, and in 1896 succeeded Professor Child as Professor of the Division of Modern Languages (i.e., languages other than Latin or Greek), with a final say in the granting of degrees. He and Child had shared the teaching of English 2 (Shakespeare), which Kittredge took over in 1896 on Child's death. Because Child had died without quite finishing his work of ballad scholarship, Child's publishers asked Kittredge to see the project through the press and to supply a short introduction to the five-volume opus. Later, Kittredge helped expand ballad and folklore studies to include American folklore, serving in 1904 as president of the American Folklore Society. Kittredge also took over Child's graduate course in the English and Scottish popular ballad.

English 2, the Shakespeare class for which Kittredge became so famous, was a lecture courses of about 275 Harvard students. He also gave the course to the women students at Radcliffe, as well as lecturing on Shakespeare at the Lowell Institute and on tours. Other courses and subjects which Kittredge taught or co-taught were English 28, a survey course covering Chaucer, the epic, and the ballad; Historical English Grammar, and Anglo-Saxon, a prerequisite for his course in Beowulf. In the German Department, Kittredge taught Icelandic, Old Norse, and, for many years, a course in German Mythology. His graduate courses included Germanic and Celtic Religions (which he co-taught with F. N. Robinson, a Celticist); English Metrical Romances (including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo); as well as Child's ballad course.

Kittredge's students included Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John A. Lomax, whose lectures and collection of cowboy ballads Kittredge supported, and the folklorists Robert Winslow Gordon, James Madison Carpenter, William S. Burroughs and Stith Thompson. Kittredge was named Gurney Professor of English at Harvard in 1917. He retired from teaching in 1936 and continued to work on his edition of Shakespeare until his death in 1941.