The director of Brigham Young University’s nationally recognized David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies was struck by a car and killed this week while riding his bike.

Vincent Stanley Benfell III, known simply as “Stan” to his legion of friends and family and who also served as BYU’s associate international vice president, was hit Monday morning at a busy intersection in Provo.

He died the same day. He was 63.

“Stan was deeply admired, loved and respected,” the Kennedy Center wrote in a statement posted on social media. “He always had an open door and loved to listen to and learn from students, colleagues and friends.”

Provo police said Friday the collision remained under investigation.

A renowned scholar

Born in Salt Lake City, Benfell completed his undergraduate work at BYU — the flagship school of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — before obtaining his doctorate in comparative literature at New York University.

As part of his dissertation, he spent a year in Italy as a Fulbright scholar with his wife, Leslie Cantwell. The couple soon settled in Utah, and Benfell went to work for his alma mater in 1994.

Three children followed — Grace, Matthew and Frances.

Benfell, who served for a time as a lay bishop for Provo’s Oak Hills Fourth Ward, began his academic career teaching classes on medieval literature. Through the years, the renowned scholar of Dante and Renaissance literature helped direct a number of study abroad programs, including in London.

“I studied with Stan Benfell 18 years ago in London,” one commenter wrote on the Kennedy Center’s announcement of his death. “[It was] the greatest experience of my college career.”

In 2021, he was promoted to director of the Kennedy Center and associate international vice president of BYU.⁠

‘Consistently kind’

“He was one of the most consistently kind, thoughtful and generous men I’ve ever known,” friend and neighbor Morgan Davis said Friday. “I felt genuinely safe telling him anything and talking about any challenge, no matter how personal or daunting.”

Davis wasn’t alone.

“He was one of my favorite bishops growing up,” another social media commenter wrote. “Never judged me. Always supported.”

Benfell loved to sing, hike and see his favorite sports teams play live.

Steve Bennett, a friend dating back to graduate school, said he and Benfell would catch a Cubs game together every year or so when his friend visited Chicago for an annual academic conference.

Bennett, who said he “never managed to break into the academy,” grew emotional recalling how much interest his friend showed in his work as a special-education teacher for Chicago’s public schools.

“It really speaks to who Stan was,” Bennett said, “that he was…always just unbelievably, genuinely supportive of what I do and valued it.”

Benfell possessed “a photographic memory,” another friend, Kent Christensen said, which he would use to recall lines from Shakespeare and Monty Python with equal ease.

A personal struggle

He was also, according to his own assessment, a deeply anxious person.

“When I am asked to describe what my anxiety feels like, I usually say that it is a lot like fear,” Benfell wrote in a 2024 Wayfare essay. “The two feelings, in fact, are so similar that I am tempted to say that anxiety makes me a coward.”

But, in fact, he was not a coward, said fellow BYU professor and friend George Handley, partly because of the courage he took from his Latter-day Saint faith.

“He believed in the promises of Christ,” Handley said. “He believed in the promise of unconditional love. He believed in the promise of quick forgiveness when we repent. He believed in power beyond his own natural abilities to maybe even convert some weaknesses into strengths.”

Handley concluded: “And his life bore that out.”