Person

My interest in translation and dialogue goes back to my childhood and youth in South India. In the 1970s, I studied Sanskrit in Copenhagen and Arabic and Religious Studies in Lund. In 1989, I presented my PhD thesis with a study and a text-critical edition of a Christian Arabic treatise from ninth-century Iraq. After research in Tübingen and Rome, I was appointed professor of Semitic Languages at Lund University in 1994. For six years I participated in a research programme on “Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective” and studied the Arabic concept of literature and the Arabic translation of the Iliad. Presently, I am a member of the research programme “Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia” and study sixth-century manuscripts of the Apophtegmata Patrum in Syriac. I was the secretary of the Royal Society of Letters at Lund 1997-2006, and I am a member of Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Union européenne des arabisants et islamisants, and the American Oriental Society.

• Semitic Languages at Lund University
• Semitiska språk vid Lunds universitet.pdf