Kyoko Iriye Selden, a scholar and teacher at Cornell University, died in Ithaca, New York, on Sunday at the age of 76 after contracting pneumonia.

Born on Oct. 2, 1936, in Tokyo, Iriye graduated in 1959 with top honors from the English department of the University of Tokyo. She then went to Yale University on a Fulbright scholarship. Among her teachers there was Cleanth Brooks, the proponent of New Criticism. It was at Yale where she met Mark Selden, who later in life was to become a Marxist historian and sociologist, as well as her husband.

Iriye received a Ph.D. for studies on the Elizabethan text "Gismond of Salerne" (1965). Her studies in English literature bore fruit in her close annotation and explanation for Japanese readers of "The Spanish Tragedy" (1972), a play by Thomas Kyd.