Dr Mark Turin

Mark Turin is a linguistic anthropologist. He studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and holds a PhD in descriptive linguistics from Leiden University where he was affiliated to the Himalayan Languages Project during which time he wrote a grammar of Thangmi, a hitherto undescribed Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. He is currently a Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he directs both the recently established World Oral Literature Project, an urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record, and the Digital Himalaya Project which he co-founded in 2000 as a platform to make multi-media resources from the Himalayan region widely available online. He has also held research appointments at Cornell and Leipzig universities, and the Namgyal Institute of Tibetology in Sikkim, India. From 2007 to 2008, he served as Chief of Translation and Interpretation at the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN). He writes and lectures on ethnolinguistics, visual anthropology, digital archives and fieldwork methodology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author or coauthor of four books, the editor of four volumes and has published numerous articles and book chapters.