Professor Geert Jan van Gelder FBA

Middle Eastern and African Languages and Literatures Middle East

Fellow type: UK Fellow
Year elected: 2005
Sections: Africa, Asia and the Middle East

Summary

Born in Amsterdam in 1947, Geert Jan van Gelder studied Semitic Languages (with Arabic as main subject) at the Universities of Amsterdam and Leiden (doctorate Leiden, 1982). He was employed as Lecturer in Arabic at the University of Groningen from 1975 until 1998, when he was elected Laudian Professor of Arabic, University of Oxford and became a Professorial Fellow of St John's College. He retired from the Laudian Chair in 2012 and returned to the Netherlands in 2015. He has published widely on Classical Arabic Literature, especially belles-lettres, poetry, poetics, stylistics, and the history of genres and themes.

Current post

Laudian Professor of Arabic Emeritus, University of Oxford

Past appointments

University of Oxford Laudian Professor of Arabic

1998 -

University of Oxford Laudian Professor of Arabic, University of Oxford

1998 -

University of Oxford Laudian Professor of Arabic Emeritus, University of Oxford

1995 -

University of Groningen, Netherlands Lecturer in Arabic

1975 - 1998

University of Amsterdam

1973 - 1975

Publications

Abu l-`Ala' al-Ma`arri, The Epistle of Forgiveness, ed. and tr. (with Gregor Schoeler) New York, 2013

Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology New York, 2013

Sound and Sense in Classical Arabic Poetry Wiesbaden, 2012

Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem 1982

The Bad and the Ugly: Attitudes towards Invective Poetry (Hija) in Classical Arabic Literature 1988

Close Relationships: Incest and Inbreeding in Classical Arabic Literature 2005

Other Fellows of the British Academy

Professor Javed Majeed FBA

Intellectual and literary history of colonial and postcolonial South Asia; colonialism, nationalism and literature; language politics and ideas of language in South Asia; Islam and colonialism; modern Urdu literature

Professor Anne Gerritsen FBA

Late imperial China, the early modern history of exchange between Asia and Europe, and especially the material culture of global exchange, therapeutic commodities, and the cultures and practices of merchants

Professor Sheldon Pollock FBA

Sanskrit philology; Indian literature, intellectual history, history of aesthetics; theory of philology and of comparativism

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