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Prof. Franklin Lewis — Life & Work
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This site includes Franklin Lewis’s biography, photos, and more.
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Franklin Lewis is Associate Professor of Persian in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a Deputy Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, and past President of the American Institute of Iranian Studies. His research focuses on Persian and Arabic literature and philology, comparative literature and translation theory, Islamic Studies, Sufism, and Baha’i Studies.
Prof. Lewis contributed the essay “Towards a Chronology of the Poems in the Dīvān-i Shams: A Prolegomenon for a Periodization of Rumi’s Literary Oeuvre,” to the volume The Philosophy of Ecstasy: Rumi and the Sufi Tradition.
In addition to numerous articles in academic journals and encyclopedias, including the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Encyclopaedia of the Qur’ān, and Encyclopedia of Religion, Lewis has published translations of fiction by Iranian writers, including In a Voice of their Own: Stories written by Iranian women since the Revolution of 1979; Zoya Pirzad’s novel, Things We Left Unsaid (2012); and Jamalzadeh’s Masumeh of Shiraz. He has written on the poet Sanâ’i (1995), and the popular 12th-century Sufi saint, Shaykh Ahmad-e Jâm, The Colossal Elephant and His Spiritual Feats: Shaykh Ahmad-e Jām (co-authored with Heshmat Moayyad; Mazda, 2004). In 2000, Lewis’ Rumi: Past and Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld) received the BRISMES British-Kuwaiti Friendship award; it has been translated to Persian, Turkish and Danish. His translations of Rumi’s poetry appeared in 2008 as Rumi: Swallowing the Sun. With Hassan Lahouti, he has edited and translated the Spiritual Lessons of Borhân al-Din Mohaqqeq of Termez (forthcoming). Lewis’ recent work has focused on conversion narratives; the transfer of tales and stories from Persian and Arabic sources to European languages in the 12th-15th centuries; the chronology of Rumi’s poetry; the poetry of Rumi’s son, Soltân Valad; the role of women in medieval Sufi circles; the politics of poetic patronage; the semiotics of dawn in the ghazals of Hâfez, etc. He guest-edited an issue of Iran Nameh about Rumi, and is currently editing a special issue of Iranian Studies on Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, and working on the Iranian communist fiction writer Bozorg Alavi, who lived in exile in East Berlin after 1953.
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World Wisdom books with contributions from Franklin Lewis
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