Team > Dr. Phil. Felipe Francisco

Faculty of Languages and Literatures
Chair of Arabic Studies

Dr. Felipe B. Francisco is Research Associate at the Chair of Arabic Studies, Faculty of Languages and Literature, at the University of Bayreuth for the Summer Semester 2025 and Winter Semester 2025/26. He holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from the University of São Paulo (Brazil), awarded in 2019, with a dissertation entitled “The Arabic Dialect of Essaouira: Description and Documentation of a Southern Moroccan Variety.”

His recent academic positions include a CAPES-Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship at the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies at the Free University Berlin, and a lectureship in Arabic Language and Literature at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Dr. Francisco’s current research focuses on Arabic dialectology in the Maghreb from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. His work combines linguistic fieldwork with early modern historiography, philological analysis, and paleographic methods. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to address questions of language maintenance and change in lesser-studied varieties, particularly those spoken in southern Morocco and along the Atlantic coast. He is especially interested in the historical and linguistic contact between North African and Andalusi Arabic and Romance languages—most notably Portuguese—both in the Iberian Peninsula and during the Portuguese occupation of Morocco’s Atlantic seaboard.

In parallel to his academic work, Dr. Francisco is also active as a literary translator between Arabic and Portuguese. He serves as the vice-leader of the research group “Tarjama,” dedicated to Arabic literary translators (link), and coordinated by Prof. Dr. Safa Jubran at the University of São Paulo. His translation work forms part of a broader South-South cultural and literary exchange, contributing to the growing movement to decentralize translation flows from the traditional dominance of the Global North. In recent years, he has collaborated with specialized publishing houses in Brazil, conducting conversations with Arab authors as well as Brazilian writers—of Arab descent or otherwise—whose work resonates with Arabic literary production.

Personal website: https://felipebenjaminfrancisco.academia.edu/

Faculty of Languages and Literatures
Chair of Arabic Studies

Research interests

• Arabic Dialectology
• Arabic Varieties in Southern Morocco
• Arabic and Romance Languages in Contact
• Contemporary Arabic Literature
• Edition and Translation of Arabic sources
• Middle Arabic
• Moroccan Judeo-Arabic
• Portuguese Aljamia

Faculty of Languages and Literatures
Chair of Arabic Studies

Publications

Faculty of Languages and Literatures
Chair of Arabic Studies

Dr. Phil. Felipe Francisco

Phone: +49 0921 55-3554
E-mail: Felipe.Francisco@uni-bayreuth.de