Professor Keenan has served as Associate Director (1973-1975) and then as Director (1976-1977) of Harvard's Russian Research Center, and as Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies over a considerable period of time. He has also served as Director of The Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington DC. Professor Keenan is the author of a number of texts that contest the authenticity normally attributed to the Russian medieval period — “The Kurbskii-Groznyi Apocrypha: The Seventeenth-century Genesis of the 'Correspondence' Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV” (1973) “Joseph Dobrovsky and the Origins of the 'Igor Tale'” (2003) as well as a major text on the Soviet political culture “Muscovite Political Folkways” (1985).
