Bo Utas

Bo Utas, born May 26, 1938 in Höglunda, a village in Jämtland, Sweden, is a Swedish linguist, Iranologist and chess historian. He is professor emeritus in Iranian languages at Uppsala University, and a scholar on Persian historical linguistics and classical Persian literature.

Career

Bo Utas got acquainted with Persian literature in secondary school. In 1959 he started to study Persian at Uppsala University for his mentor Henrik Samuel Nyberg and defended his PhD thesis in 1973. His thesis is a critical edition of the Sufi masnavi poem Tariq to-tahqiq which has been ascribed to Hakim Sanai of Ghazna.^[1] Utas travelled extensively in Iran and Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s. From 1988 he became the first professor in Iranian languages at Uppsala University, a chair that he held until he retired in 2003. Under his supervision, no less than eight PhD candidates defended their theses successfully.^[2]

Bo Utas is a member of several learned societies, including the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, Societas Iranologica Europaea, and the Royal Society for the Humanities in Uppsala. He was the first secretary of the Societas Iranologica Europaea.

Bo Utas knows several languages, including Avesta, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Hebrew and Arabic.

A full list of his publications shows his broad and diverse scholarship on Middle Persian and New Persian language and literature, manuscript tradition and text edition, culture and religion in Greater Iran.^[3]

Bo Utas has translated several Persian classical and modern literary works into Swedish, including the Buf-e kur (Blind Owl) by Sadeq Hedayat.

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