Geoffrey Khan

Geoffrey Allan Khan FBA, (b. 1 February 1958, Cheltenham, United Kingdom) is the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, a post he has held since 2012. He has published grammars for the Aramaic dialects of Barwari, Qaraqosh, Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Halabja in Iraq, and Urmia and Sanandaj in Iran and leads the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Database.

Biography

Khan was born in Cheltenham and went to school in Middlesbrough. In 1984, he gained his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies with a thesis entitled Extraposition and Pronominal Agreement in Semitic Languages. He became a researcher at the Cambridge University Library (1983-1993), working on the Cairo Genizah manuscripts. He then joined the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies in 1993. In 2002, he was appointed Professor of Semitic Philology in Cambridge.

His main area of research is in linguistics studies of Hebrew and Aramaic while the focus of his Aramaic research is on North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic Dialects.

Honours

• Fellow of the British Academy, 1998
• Honorary Fellow of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2011.
• Lidzbarski Gold Medal for Semitic philology, 2004.