Kendall Tarte was hired at Wake Forest University in 1996 for an initial one-year contract as a French instructor. Luckily for Wake Forest, that one year turned into 29 years full of Kendall’s teaching, mentorship, research and global education.
Kendall is a professor of French Studies at Wake Forest University with publications such as Writing Places: Sixteenth-Century City Culture and the Des Roches Salon (University of Delaware Press, 2007), and articles in such journals as Romanic Review, Sixteenth Century Journal, Renaissance et Réforme, and French Review. Kendall is co-editor (with Jeff Persels and George Hoffmann) of Itineraries in French Renaissance Literature (Brill, 2017) and (with Anne Hardcastle and Roberta Morosini) of Coming of Age on Film: Stories of Transformation in World Cinema (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).
Previously, Kendall served as the chair of the French Studies department from 2017-2022 and was a resident faculty member for the Wake Forest study abroad program in Dijon, France in 2008, 2014 and 2024. Her current research, which was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, studies how geographers, historians and visual artists depicted France during the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century.