Professor Geoffrey Khan FBA has been elected Regius Professor of Hebrew with effect from 1 October 2012. A Fellow of Wolfson since 1994, Geoffrey is Professor of Semitic Philology, and Chair of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Professor Khan's PhD thesis (School of Oriental and African Studies 1984) concerned syntactic structures in Semitic languages. Thereafter, his research has concentrated on the history of the Hebrew language, the early traditions of Hebrew grammatical thought, medieval Arabic documents and modern Aramaic dialects. Over the last few years he has concentrated on the documentation of the modern Aramaic dialects, most of which are now highly endangered. He is currently the general editor of The Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1998 and awarded the Lidzbarski Gold Medal for Semitic philology by the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft in 2004.