Franke holds degrees in philosophy and theology from Williams College and Oxford University and in comparative literature from UC Berkeley and Stanford (Ph.D. 1991).
The sequel, Dante and the Sense of Transgression: The Trespass of the Sign (2012), complements it by bringing the Comedy into dialogue with contemporary French thought of difference (Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, Levinas, Derrida).
2021 saw the publication of three monographs by Franke rewriting the history of philosophy as pivoting around Dante rather than Descartes viewed as origin for emerging modern forms of self-reflection.
Franke has published well over a hundred essays and articles of philosophical and theological interpretations of literature ranging from the biblical prophets and classical poets to Shakespeare and Milton, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Edmond Jabès, and Paul Celan.
These essays deal also with theoretical topics such as dialectical and deconstructive logic, figurative rhetoric, psychoanalysis as a hermeneutics of subjectivity, postsecular critical reason, and cultural theory in the wake of the death of God.