Professor Geoffrey Khan

The research of Geoffrey Khan includes philological and linguistic studies of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic. He has a broad interest in all periods of the Hebrew language and is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, which was first published in 2013 (Boston: Brill) and is updated on an annual basis. This contains approximately 1,000 articles on all periods, traditions and methodological approaches to the Hebrew language. He has a specific interest in Biblical Hebrew. In his Ph.D. thesis he addressed various aspects of Biblical Hebrew syntax and subsequently worked on a variety of manuscript sources relating to the Tiberian Masoretic tradition and the pronunciation traditions of Biblical Hebrew. A concise overview of his work in this field can be found in his book A Short Introduction to the Masoretic Hebrew Bible and its Reading Tradition (Gorgias, Piscataway, 2nd edition, 2013). Closely related to his work on the Tiberian Masoretic tradition is his research on medieval Hebrew grammatical thought, especially that of the Karaite grammarians, who were closely associated with the Tiberian Masoretes. He has been commissioned by Oxford University Press to prepare the Oxford Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, which will present an updating and major expansion of Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar. Geoffrey Khan’s interests in Aramaic focus for the most part on the documentation of modern spoken forms of the language. He has undertaken extensive fieldwork on the many endangered dialects of the so-called North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic subgroup, which were originally spoken in northern Iraq, southeastern Turkey and western Iran. This research has resulted in the publication of a variety grammatical descriptions and an on-line database. In the field of Arabic his main published research has been on medieval Arabic documents. He has edited various corpora of documents, including Arabic papyri from early Islamic Egypt, documents from early Islamic Khurasan, and documents from Fatimid and Ayyubid Egypt that have been preserved in the Cairo Genizah. He is currently working on documents from the Fatimid period that were discovered in Qaṣr Ibrīm (Nubia) by the Egypt Exploration Society. He also works on some aspects of the history of the Arabic language, in particular the development of Judaeo-Arabic at various historical periods, including the modern spoken varieties, on which he has carried out fieldwork.