In Memoriam Edward L. Keenan

russian history 42 (2015) 371-375

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In Memoriam ∵

Edward L. Keenan

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). He was an early board member and great supporter of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute (founded 1973), and ended his career as director of Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections (1998–2007). He also served as Master in a Harvard residential House (North House, now Pforzheimer, 1970–75).

At the national level he was in on the shaping of the field of Slavic Studies. He taught Russian history in flawless Russian at the Indiana University Slavic Workshop (summers 1962–64), preparing students for the newly founded pro- gram of academic exchange between the u.s. and the ussr (iuctg, later irex). He was a founder (1975) and Board member (1981–87) of the National Council for Soviet and East European Research; he was elected President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 1994; he fre- quently spoke and wrote about Soviet-American relations. Keenan’s scholarly career was shaped by epistemological rigor (“how do we know what we think we know?” was a favorite query) and fascination with the world of the early modern in all its differences from us. In an early publication [“Muscovy and Kazan” (1967)] he lamented “the sad misunderstandings which the modern world has interposed between historians and pre-modern history” and set out methodological premises to overcome presentist and nationalistic biases in Russian history writing. He argued that historians must seek systema- ticity, “rigorously delineated patterns” in the historical record; one must com- prehensively place sources in their appropriate context. For early Russia, that context ranged from Tatar steppe politics to the social ferment of East Slavic Orthodoxia in seventeenth-century Ukraine to the world of the Russian peas- ant village. Genre was a persistent concern for him: “criticism and analysis of form” must precede “criticism and interpretation of content” [“The Jarlyk of Akhmed-Khan” (1969)], since genre shapes and limits texts as historical sources. As he often said with a chuckle, you can’t write a love poem if all the poetry you know is a limerick. At the same time he welcomed any and all inter- disciplinary and theoretical approaches that might open perspectives on a pre-modern Russian past with frustratingly few sources, in both genre and number. He situated sources and history by rigorous analysis of concrete, material reality: he constantly asked questions such as where were the trade routes and diplomatic interactions, who was traveling where, who could have influenced whom, who knew which languages of interaction, who had reason to borrow what and how. He would stop students short with a pointed query – “What is really going on here?”—pushing them to liberate themselves from the precon- ceptions of the secondary literature to listen to the sources. True to his Turkologist training, he presented Russian history in a Eurasianist grand sweep; in his lecture course, Keenan took particular delight in recounting the archeo- logical sources (coin hordes, stele) that told the tale of Scandinavian traders breaking river and portage routes from the Baltic to the great Silk Roads via the Volga and Dnieper rivers in stages over the ninth century. His dissertation (“Muscovy and Kazan” 1965) depicted the system of “steppe politics” that

russian history 42 (2015) 371-375