Short biography, 1987-2012

Mark Rennella short biography for Amherst College 25th Reunion

After graduating from Amherst, I lived in France for two years – the first year on a Rotary International scholarship and the second teaching English at the University of Tours. It was the best time of my life up to that point! I also fell in love with a French woman whom I eventually married at the tender age of 25.

After France, I moved to Miami (my home town) where I received a M.A. in English. I was thinking about getting a Ph.D. in English, but the state of things in grad school for a lover of literature was grim. Literature wasn’t literature any more, I learned – it was philosophy. That was not for me. So, I decided to get a Ph.D. in American Intellectual History (at Brandeis) where I could study texts in their historical context (without making excuses), which I loved doing as an American Studies major at Amherst (inspired by Bob Gross).

The Ph.D. took a while – ten years until I eventually finished the dissertation. In the meantime, my French wife left the marriage for greener pastures. Two years later, I married a woman from Massachusetts who had studied at Northeastern. While I was earning the Ph.D., I lived in Lowell, Massachusetts (my wife’s home town), where rent was cheap! I taught as an adjunct here and there until getting the best adjunct job I could think of – as a lecturer at the History and Literature Program at Harvard. I spent six years there, earning my Ph.D. in the middle of my stint there in 2001. That was also the year my first boy, Davis Henry Rennella, was born. My second boy, Benjamin Emmanuel Rennella, arrived on August 19, 2004 (see photos).

In the early 2000s, seeing that prospects for teaching in the humanities were not too promising, I searched for a career change. I credit one of my dissertation readers from Brandeis, the very prolific and insightful Morton Keller, with giving me a nudge in the right direction. Keller was a business historian and knew that Harvard Business School employed all kinds of people as Research Associates – which was a way to shift towards the business world. I was wary at first having learned about how evil business was in my previous education in the humanities. But, I got over that fear and began working for a marketing professor who was interested in cultural history. It was a good match. I eventually worked for four years at HBS. During that time, I published my dissertation (The Boston Cosmopolitans) and became a co-author of a business book on leadership called Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders. (Soon after the second book was published, one of my co-authors became Dean of HBS, a stroke of good fortune I’m still trying to exploit!)

Life being full of surprises, my second wife left our marriage for her own set of greener pastures in 2007. In 2008, I moved from Chelmsford, Massachusetts, to Arlington, where I live with my sons today. After HBS, I stayed in business and worked for an executive education firm starting in 2007 for about three years. Most recently, I went back to Harvard where I now work for Harvard Business Publishing, which is a great combination of the academic and business worlds.

Looking to the future, I’m hoping to write some fiction – just for fun, and maybe for profit. I’m also thinking about combining the work of my two books to write about the emerging field of “Global Leadership.” I’ll also be following the progress of my two sons whose loving natures and open minds have brought so much joy to my life (see photos). Lately, they’ve become creative collaborators, working together on a series of comics called “Adventures of the Snuggle Buddies.” It’s sort of like Star Wars meets SpongeBob. Ask me about how they’ve progressed at our 30th reunion!