Scholar Spotlight: Professor Alexander Key

Each month, we will be spotlighting an Abbasi Program affiliate on campus. This month, our spotlight shines on Professor Alexander Key, Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature.

Thanks for taking the time for this interview, Professor Key. Tell us about your current research/what excites you in Islamic Studies right now.

Hello! I think of myself as a philologist: someone who studies (and cares about!) words and what they mean, whether these are words in poems or words that make up theories about how the world is and should be. Islamic Studies is in an interesting place at the moment: on the one hand scholars are now finally producing overlapping research on the vast diversity that was always present in the Islamic archive – recent work on Africa (including that of my interviewer Farah El-Sharif) is a good example. On the other hand, we still have not made even the most basic sources readily available to people who do not read the languages in which they were written (the “Classical” Arabic works that “postclassical” African scholars read and engaged with remain untranslated, for example). But this work is slowly getting done, and I think we will see the benefits across academia in a decade or so. I think particularly of the Library of Arabic Literature series from NYU Abu Dhabi, and projects like Alan Williams’s translation of the Masnavi into blank verse.

How did your interest in Islamic Studies begin and how would you define your approach to it?

It’s funny, I never thought of myself as an Islamic Studies specialist during undergraduate or after graduation, even though the Arabic part of my Arabic and International Relations degree included Quranic studies and Classical Arabic literature, and even though I then ended up working in human rights and writing on questions of Muslim access to political and civic rights in Palestine and Israel. It was only when my PhD at Harvard taught “Arabic and Islamic Studies” as a pairing that I started to think of myself as taking part in a field with that label. Now I work in Comparative Literature, which is a discipline both radically open to all forms of human literary and cultural endeavor, and at the same time somewhat behind the curve when it comes to taking advantage of the conceptual resources available in Islamic literature, history, and culture. As a philologist – someone who works closely with words – I find myself in the position of trying to advertise the advantages of Islamic Studies to my colleagues in Comparative Literature.

What are some of the aspects you wish more people knew about your work?

I just published an article on Neoplatonic poetics that deals with al-Hallaj and the Bay Area poet Robert Duncan, among others.

What is your favorite course to teach at Stanford?

At the moment, I am having a lot of fun co-teaching a course on Islamic science with my colleague in Classics Reviel Netz – we are tackling the way astronomy, mathematics, and linguistics developed in Islamic societies from the eighth century onwards. It is also always a privilege to teach the Comparative Literature Capstone Seminar; the department has a great group of majors in senior year who are working on all kinds of different topics. This quarter, I have been introducing them to Classical Arabic poetics and the way scholars like ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani can help us read poems in English today.

What advice would you offer to students wanting to pursue Arabic and the study of Arabic texts?

Early and often! Arabic is a massively rewarding language that offers access to vast untapped resources for contemporary thought, politics, history, and much more. Arabic does take several years to learn, but college is the best time to do that, and the Abbasi Program offers summer funding that can enable students to get a head start on their Stanford Language Center courses for the next year.