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A Poetics of Conversion: Crossing and Transgressing Religious Boundaries in Persian Literature

  • 208 Knox Hall, Columbia University (map)

Franklin Lewis, Associate Professor of Persian, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Professor Franklin Lewis is an Associate Professor of Persian Language and Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and Deputy Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. He teaches classes on Persian language and literature, Islamic thought, Sufism, Baha'i Studies, translation studies, and Middle Eastern cinema.

Professor Lewis studied at U.C. Berkeley and did his graduate work in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His dissertation on the life and works of the 12th-century mystical poet Sana'i, and the establishment of the ghazal genre in Persian literature, won the Foundation of Iranian Studies best dissertation prize in 1995. Prof. Lewis previously taught Persian a tEmory University, in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. He founded Adabiyat, an international discussion forum on the literatures of the Islamic World (including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu) and is former President of the American Institute of Iranian Studies.

Introduction by Hossein Kamaly, Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures, Barnard College of Columbia University

Sponsored by the Middle East Institute.