Alexander Forte

Alexander Forte is a Classicist whose research lies at the intersection of intellectual history, linguistics, and literary criticism. Some topics of his published and forthcoming scholarship include: Greco-Ugaritic comparison and historical contact between early “literary” traditions, epistemological vagaries of idiom in antiquity, Pre-Socratic philosophy’s debt to earlier poetic traditions and its relationship to Indic and Iranian thoughts,  methods of comparative Indo-European poetics, conceptualizations of repetition in Homeric poetry, and the relationship between neurophenomenological and cognitive linguistic approaches to emotion in ancient texts. He is currently completing a book on metaphor in Homer.

A larger methodological thread running throughout his work concerns the ways in which philology, as a recursive discipline of language, can be productively integrated with aspects of American pragmatism, phenomenology, cognitive and historical linguistics, and psychology. A part of this project studies how embodied metaphors structure ancient texts, and how we use these same metaphors to construct and mediate modern realities, scholarly and other.

He is currently a lecturer for the Interdisciplinary Program in Ancient and Medieval Studies. This Interdisciplinary program is supported by faculty from Architecture, History, Literature, Music, and Philosophy.