Alexander Forte
My research lies at the intersection of intellectual history, linguistics, and literary criticism. Some topics of my 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 thought, methods of comparative Indo-European poetics, conceptualizations of repetition as modelling intertextuality, and the relationship between neurophenomenological and cognitive linguistic approaches to emotion.
A larger methodological thread that runs throughout my work is a concern with 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.
Particularly, I am interested in advancing an empirically rigorous account of lexical meaning (and necessarily category construction) to create new ways of reading and understanding ancient poetic traditions. 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.
I received my AB in Greek and Latin from Brown University in 2009, having started Sanskrit as a visiting student at Oxford. After taking a gap year to tutor Classics in New York and study Sanskrit in Pune, India, I began my PhD at Harvard in Classical Philology, graduating in 2017 with a secondary field in Historical Linguistics and a dissertation on metaphor in Homer.
Please feel free to contact me about anything on this page. I enjoy collaboration.
https://www.postclassicisms.org/network-members/affiliated-network/alexander-forte/
Supervisors: Gregory Nagy, Jeremy Rau, and David Elmer
A larger methodological thread that runs throughout my work is a concern with 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.
Particularly, I am interested in advancing an empirically rigorous account of lexical meaning (and necessarily category construction) to create new ways of reading and understanding ancient poetic traditions. 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.
I received my AB in Greek and Latin from Brown University in 2009, having started Sanskrit as a visiting student at Oxford. After taking a gap year to tutor Classics in New York and study Sanskrit in Pune, India, I began my PhD at Harvard in Classical Philology, graduating in 2017 with a secondary field in Historical Linguistics and a dissertation on metaphor in Homer.
Please feel free to contact me about anything on this page. I enjoy collaboration.
https://www.postclassicisms.org/network-members/affiliated-network/alexander-forte/
Supervisors: Gregory Nagy, Jeremy Rau, and David Elmer
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This article argues that a significant portion of the chariot race in the funeral games of Iliad 23 occurs at the turn in the track. The ancient scholarly tradition is concordant with this analysis; however, recent scholarship has largely dismissed this scenario due to a common mistranslation of spatiotemporal language.
Dissertation by Alexander Forte
Conference Presentations by Alexander Forte
Drafts by Alexander Forte
Books by Alexander Forte
Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.
This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.
This article argues that a significant portion of the chariot race in the funeral games of Iliad 23 occurs at the turn in the track. The ancient scholarly tradition is concordant with this analysis; however, recent scholarship has largely dismissed this scenario due to a common mistranslation of spatiotemporal language.
Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.
This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.