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 received his AB in Greek and Latin from Brown University and his PhD from Harvard in Classical Philology, with a secondary field in Historical Linguistics.
