Author Biography
Samuel Jay Keyser attended George Washington, Oxford and Yale Universities. With a PhD in linguistics from Yale. Keyser has taught at Brandeis University, University College, London, the University of Massachusetts and MIT where he joined the faculty. He is currently Professor Emeritus and Special Assistant to the Chancellor.Aside from his academic writings, Keyser has written a book of poems Raising the Dead, a book of children's poems The Pond God and Other Stories (winner of a Lee Bennett Hopkins Honor Book Award), and Mens et Mania: The MIT Nobody Knows, an account of the MIT culture from his vantage point as Department Head, housemaster and Associate Provost (MIT Press: May, 2011). Keyser plays jazz trombone with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, an avant-garde jazz orchestra and the New Liberty Jazz Band, a Dixieland band that plays in the New Orleans style from the back of a restored 1941 Ford fire engine. Between the two bands Keyser has appeared on more than a dozen CDs.
