Keele, Alan Frank

Alan Frank Keele (born 1942) was a professor at Brigham Young University.

Alan Frank Keele was born on November 17, 1942 in Provo, Utah. He attended the University of Utah on a Rotary International scholarship, majoring in chemistry before serving a thirty-month mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Germany from 1962 to 1964. He received a BA from Brigham Young University in German and History in 1967 and a PhD in German Language and Literature from Princeton in 1971. He has studied German, French, Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Russian.

He served in many positions at Brigham Young University (BYU) such as Associate Chair, Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages, Associate Dean of Honors and General Education, a member of the University Faculty Advisory Council, founding chair of the University Faculty Council on the Baccalaureate, founding co-chair of the Distance Learning Committee, founding chair of the Student Housing Initiatives in Education (SHINE) Committee, which developed a network of residential-based support communities for freshmen (now known as the Freshman Academy), founding chair of the Coordinating Committee of Department Chairs, and other departmental, college, university, and professional committees.

While teaching at BYU, Keele taught a variety of courses in German language and literature, as well as general humanities courses, several colloquia in the Honors Program. Keele also directed two six-month as well as three four-month study programs in Salzburg and Vienna, Austria, and one in Berlin, Germany. He was named Honors Professor of the Year in 1992. In 1995, he received the Abraham O. Smoot citizenship award. He received a Karl G. Maeser General Education Professorship in 1996 and an Alcuin award in 2007.

He married Linda Kay Sellers. They have six children and seven grandchildren. He has served on the board of Utahans United Against the Nuclear Arms Race, Utah County Chapter, on the Area Advisory Council for the Alpine School District, as chair of the Utah Democratic Forum, as co-chair of Russian Relief, twice as an LDS campus high councilman, as a branch president of a BYU single student branch (1974-1977), and bishop of a BYU married student ward (1993-1997).

Alan Keele has published books and articles in Germany and in the US on postwar German literary authors such as Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lenz, Paul Schallück, Martin Walser, and Walter Kempowski, as well as on topics ranging from the Mormon resistance movement in the Third Reich to the historical connection between sports, games, and war to the history of technology, the ethics of abortion, the history of crystal balls and the origins of optics, artistic treatments of the notion of spiritual pre-existence, and the mythological significance of the limping hero. His most recent book looks at "LDS" ideas such as the pre-existence, temple marriage, and apotheosis in German literary, operatic, and cinematic texts.

He has been a member of the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Language, the German Studies Association, and of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA), and has served on several occasions as section chair for German in the RMMLA.

From the guide to the Alan Frank Keele papers, 1988-2001, (L. Tom Perry Special Collections)