Alexander Key
Alexander Key is a scholar of Arabic literature with interests ranging across the intellectual history of the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds from the seventh century onwards. (UC Press, ) explains Classical Arabic theories about poetry and philosophy to all who are interested in how language produces affect and reflects the world.
The book deals with multiple genres of scholarship in the work of four famous scholars: Ragib al-Isfahani, Ibn Furak, Ibn Sina, and ʿAbd al-Qahir al-Jurjani. Their detailed theories about how language works remain applicable today: we still want to understand how poetry works through syntax to create affect, and we are still interested in the problem of how language, mind, and reality interact. Language Between God and the Poets makes premodern Arabic solutions to these problems available for the first time in twenty-first-century English – within a rigorous and original theoretical framework for the translation of theory. It has been reviewed in , the , and the .
In January 2024, he provided the “” entry for the PMLA Theories and Methodologies section “An Arabic Theoretical Lexicon.”
He is currently working on an under-contract edition and translation of al-Jurjani's Dala'il al-I'jaz for the . This attempt to introduce Arabic poetics into English critical discourse follows his article on Neoplatonic poetics (al-Hallaj, Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan), his dealing with in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and a of Ali Ahmed Hussein’s . He also curated an Colloquy "" that came out of the 2018 Trans;form symposium.
Key received his Ph.D. in Arabic and Islamic Studies from Harvard University's Department of in May 2012 and started work at ý that same year. He has authored a number of articles on aspects of premodern Arabic literature and culture. These include a , a chapter co-authored with on the , a study of , and an argument
In 2018, Key guest-edited the , with a on the literary critic ʿAbd al-Qahir al-Jurjani that included an article on al-Jurjani's.
For more details on off-CV academic activities go to . For copies of some publications, . And for tweets, .
Key is proud to serve on the Board of Governors of , the Editorial Board of , and the Advisory Board of ý's . In 2023-2024 he co-chaired the and helped write its .
