Welcome to new member of staff, Professor Nathan Hill
We bid a warm welcome to Professor Nathan W. Hill who has recently joined our School as Professor in Chinese Studies and Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. Before joining Trinity, Professor Hill was Reader in Tibetan and Historical Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He earned his PhD in Tibetan Studies from Harvard University in 2009. While at SOAS, he served as Head of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of the London Confucius Institute.
Professor Hill has led projects funded by the British Academy, the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the European Research Council. The latter, 'Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State', was a six-year project to study the history and culture of early medieval India and South East Asia, conducted in collaboration with the British Museum and the British Library.
Professor Hill researches Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics. He has conducted research in descriptive linguistics, corpus linguistics, comparative reconstruction, the history of Chinese, and the typology of evidential systems. His books include The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese (2019, Cambridge), A Lexicon of Tibetan Verb Stems as Reported by the Grammatical Tradition (2010, Bavarian Academy of Sciences), and Old Tibetan Inscriptions, co-authored with Kazushi Iwao (2009, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies).