Edward L. Keenan

Keenan served as an associate director (1973 – 1975) and then director (1976 – 1977) of Harvard's Russian Research Center. He was the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1978–84) and the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies over a considerable period (1981–1983, 1986–1987, 1993–1994). He also served as a director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington DC.

Keenan was born in Buffalo, New York. In the fall of 1953, he entered Harvard and proceeded to "essentially waste [his] freshman year". Eventually he decided to major in Russian, completing his A.B. degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures in 1957. He received his A.M. in Regional Studies in 1962, and his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 1965.

Edward Louis "Ned" Keenan, Jr. (May 14, 1935 - March 9, 2015) was an American professor of history at Harvard University who specialized in medieval Russian history (especially the cultural and the political history of Muscovy). He became a prominent and controversial figure after conducting various studies that analyzed and ultimately disproved the authenticity of major resources in East Slavic history. Two of his books argue that two texts were not medieval at all, but seventeenth and eighteenth-century, respectively: The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-century Genesis of the "Correspondence" Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV (1971), and Joseph Dobrovsky and the Origins of the "Igor Tale" (2003) He eventually became one of the world's leading experts on medieval Russian history. He also wrote a number of seminal articles.