Nathan Hill

Nathan Hill is a Professor at Trinity College Dublin, holding the Sam Lam Professorship in Chinese Studies and serving as Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. He previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, where he was Head of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Director of the London Confucius Institute.

Educational Background:

• Ph.D. in Linguistics, Harvard University, 2009

Nathan Hill specializes in Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics, with a focus on Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. His research spans Old Tibetan descriptive and corpus linguistics, Tibeto-Burman comparative linguistics, historical phonology, and the typology of evidential systems. He integrates computational methods with traditional philology to reconstruct ancestral languages and develop tools for endangered language communities. His recent work includes automated phonological reconstruction, NLP pipelines for Tibetan and Newar, and critical reassessments of Old Chinese reconstruction methodologies.

His publications reveal consistent engagement with sound change, morphological evolution, and syntactic-pragmatic features across Sino-Tibetan languages. He frequently collaborates on interdisciplinary projects combining linguistic theory, digital humanities, and language technology. His recent articles highlight trends toward computational modeling, uncertainty quantification in reconstruction, and practical applications in text recognition and language processing for under-resourced languages.

Scientific Awards:

• Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics, Young Scholar (2018)
• Li Fang-Kuei Society for Chinese Linguistics, Young Scholar (2013)
• China Times Young Scholars Award (2008)

Nathan Hill actively mentors doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, supervising work on language documentation, computational modeling, and historical analysis. He has led major research projects funded by the European Research Council, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the British Academy, securing over €11 million in funding. His projects have produced practical tools such as part-of-speech taggers, predictive keyboards for minority languages, and text recognition systems, with real-world impact recognized in the UK's Research Excellence Framework.

He is involved in several research labs and collaborative teams, including those developing NLP tools for low-resource Sino-Tibetan languages, corpus creation initiatives, and computational reconstruction frameworks. His future work continues to bridge philological rigor with computational innovation, aiming to elevate the study of Sino-Tibetan languages to the level of classical Indo-European traditions.