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Mark Turin (PhD, Linguistics, Leiden University, 2006) is an anthropologist, linguist and occasional radio presenter, and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. For academic year 2019-2010, he is a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC. He currently serves as the Interim Editor of the journal Pacific Affairs.
From 2014-2018, Dr. Turin served as Chair of the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program and from 2016-2018, as Acting Co-Director of the University’s new Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Before joining UBC, Mark was an Associate Research Scientist with the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University, and the Founding Program Director of the Yale Himalaya Initiative. He continues to hold an appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the Yale School Forestry & Environmental Studies. Prior to Yale, Mark worked a Research Associate at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. At UBC, Mark is an Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies an Affiliate Member of the Institute of Asian Research.
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. For over twenty years, Mark’s regional focus has been the Himalayan region (particularly Nepal, northern India and Bhutan), and more recently, the Pacific Northwest. Mark is very privileged to have had the opportunity to work in collaborative partnership with members of the Thangmi-speaking communities of eastern Nepal and Darjeeling district in India since 1996, and since 2014 with members of the Heiltsuk First Nation through a Heiltsuk Language Mobilization Partnership in which UBC is a founding member.
Mark has held research appointments at Cornell and Leipzig universities, as well as 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).
Mark Turin writes and teaches on ethnolinguistics, language endangerment, visual anthropology, digital archives and fieldwork methodology. He is the author or co-author of four books, the editor of nine volumes and he edits a series on oral literature. Mark is a regular BBC presenter on issues of linguistic diversity and language endangerment.
Mark was one of three principal investigators on a major five-year collaborative research project supported by the Arcadia Fund to document and protect Bhutan’s oral traditions. He is currently a Co-Investigator on Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada entitled First Nations Languages in the 21st Century: Looking Back, Looking Forward, as well as on a NASA-funded grant on Urban growth, land-use change, and growing vulnerability in the Greater Himalaya mountain range. Mark serves as a Steering Committee Member of UBC Language Sciences and was a member of the first Advisory Board of SAPIENS through 2018.
Office Hours: by appointment
My research interests can be grouped into four main clusters.
First, as a linguist and anthropologist, I have spent many years studying issues of language and cultural practice across the Himalayan region. My work is informed by a background in ethnographic methods, anthropological theory and field linguistics. In addition to Nepal, where I have worked since 1992, my interest in the Himalayan region has taken me to Bhutan, where I co-direct a 5-year collaborative research project to document the endangered oral traditions of the nation; the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China, where I researched contemporary Nepali wage labour migrants; and also to Sikkim, where I directed the first modern linguistic survey of this small Indian state in partnership with the local government and a Sikkimese research institute.
Second, through my long-term fieldwork in the Himalayas, I have become increasingly interested in how insights derived from academic research can inform policy and practice. Since 2003, I have worked as an occasional consultant for the World Bank, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and various UN agencies. Projects have included drafting the first inclusive multilingual education policy for Nepal, advising the Government of Nepal on the linguistic rights of its citizens and assessing the impact of sustainable ecotourism in Tibet. In 2007, I was asked to create and direct the Translation and Interpretation Unit in the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), a special political mission mandated by the UN Security Council to support Nepal’s peace process.
Third, I am committed to innovation in teaching methods and to developing research partnerships with students. In my teaching, I seek to create a rich instructional experience for students at all levels, often supported by digital tools and instructional technology. In recognition of this, I was nominated as the Anthropology Associate for academic year 2009-2010 by C-SAP, the national subject network for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics funded by the UK Funding Councils for Higher Education. While at Yale, I taught an award-winning, hands-on, collaborative class that used technology to explore the links between the university’s exceptional collections from and about the Himalayan region.
The final component of my life as a scholar is designing and directing larger research projects and initiatives. I co-founded the Digital Himalaya Project in 2000, which has since then developed from its origins as an academic research project into an integrated, open scholarly portal for connecting knowledge about the Himalayan region. I have worked as a fieldwork coordinator and anthropologist on a large, international and multi-disciplinary research project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, jointly based at Leipzig University and Tribhuvan University in Nepal. From 2009, I have directed the World Oral Literature Project, tying together my enthusiasm for fundamental research at the intersection of anthropology and linguistics, a commitment to building a wider scholarly community through supporting the research of others, and a passion for engaged anthropology that reaches an audience beyond the academy.
Featured Publications
2022. Jonathan Eaton and Mark Turin. “Heritage languages and language as heritage: the language of heritage in Canada and beyond.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, 28(7): 787-802.
2022. Maya Daurio and Mark Turin. “Teaching Indigenous Language Revitalization over Zoom” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 6 (1):1-11.
2021. Natália Oliveira Ferreira and Mark Turin. “Rádios Indígenas: Brazil’s Indigenous Language Broadcasting Landscape.”
2021. Mark Turin. “Recognizing Authority and Respecting Expertise in Language Work.” In “Rethinking Pseudonyms in Ethnography,” edited by Carole McGranahan and Erica Weiss, American Ethnologist website, 13 December 2021.
Please visit the link below to explore my publications: http://markturin.arts.ubc.ca/publications/
