Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute is proud to share that Professor Carl Ernst has recently been awarded the inaugural Global Humanities Translation Prize by the Global Humanities Initiative, in partnership with Northwestern University Press. Professor Ernst received the $5,000 prize for translating and annotating the classical Arabic poems of Persian mystic Mansur al-Hallaj. Executed for heresy in 922 CE, Al-Hallaj is a pivotal figure in the literary and mystical cultures of the Islamic world, and yet this will be the first comprehensive English edition of the poems attributed to Hallaj. Of the 118 poems translated by Professor Ernst, half have never appeared in English before. The manuscript will be published in spring 2018.
William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor, Carl W. Ernst, is a specialist of Islamic studies and the co-Director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His published research, based on the study of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, has been mainly devoted to the study of three areas: general and critical issues of Islamic studies, premodern and contemporary Sufism, and Indo-Muslim culture.
Co-founded in 2015 by Laura Brueck, Associate Professor of Asian languages and cultures, and Rajeev Kinra, Associate Professor of history at Northwestern University, the Global Humanities Initiative is supported jointly by the Buffett Institute and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern.
Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute congratulates Professor Ernst on this well-deserved recognition.