Mark Turin (PhD, Linguistics, Leiden University, 2006) is a linguist and anthropologist. Before joining the South Asian Studies Council at Yale, where is Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative, Mark was a Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Now co-located at Cambridge and Yale, Mark directs both the 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.
Dr Turin 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 teaches on ethnolinguistics, visual anthropology, digital archives and fieldwork methodology at the Universities of Cambridge and Yale. He is the author or coauthor of four books, the editor of seven volumes, the series editor of a new series, and the presenter of a new BBC and NPR series on linguistic diversity and language endangerment.
photo by Dennis Ng, Dartmouth College, February 2013