russian history 42 (2015) 371-375 brill.com/ruhi In Memoriam ∵ Edward L. Keenan Nancy S. Kollmann
[email protected] Edward L. Keenan, known to friends and colleagues as Ned, passed away on Friday March 6, 2015, in the home on Deer Isle, Maine that he shared with his wife of almost thirty years, Judy. He had retired in 2008 after a long and produc- tive career as a scholar, teacher and administrator; in the last year of his life he donated his extensive scholarly library to the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Keenan was a native of western New York and attended Harvard University for his entire higher education: B.A. in Slavic Languages and Literatures (1957), M.A. in Regional Studies (1962), Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern studies (1965). He joined the Department of History and earned tenure in 1970. His impressive erudition was shaped by an extraordinary mixture of teachers: he studied structuralism and linguistics with Roman Jakobson and Horace Lunt, Slavic folklore with Dmytro Čyževs’kyj and Albert Lord, Ukrainian and Polish history and literature with Wiktor Weintraub and Omeljan Pritsak, and Turkology with Omeljan Pritsak. A talented linguist, he was fluent in Russian and Arabic and proficient in Turkic, Farsi, Uzbek, Uighur and Chagatay as well as the usual European research languages. Throughout his career he shaped academia in many leadership positions, including Associate Director and Director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center (1973–77), Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1977–84), Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (three times between 1981 and 1994), Chair of the Department of History (1988–91).