Nathan W. Hill was educated at the Catlin Gabel School and Harvard University.
He has also studied for shorter periods in France, Nepal, Tibet and Japan. He came to SOAS in 2008 after teaching at Harvard University and Universität Tübingen. At SOAS he teaches courses in historical linguistics and well as Tibetan language and history. He convenes Tibetan Studies at SOAS.
Nathan is able to supervise PhD projects on Tibetan literature and history in the Department of China and Inner Asia, as well as PhD projects on historical, descriptive and corpus linguistics, in particular with reference to Tibetan or other Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan languages, in the Department of Linguistics.
Research interests
Nathan W. Hill's research focuses on Tibetan literature and Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics. In particular he has published on Old Tibetan descriptive linguistics, Tibetan corpus linguistics, Tibeto-Burman reconstruction and comparative linguistics, and the typology of evidential systems.
Current research
Nathan W. Hill is currently one of three principal investigators on Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State, a six-year international research collaboration jointly led by SOAS, the British Museum, and the British Library, funded by the European Research Council.
He was co-investigator on Tibetan in Digital Communication: Corpus Linguistics and Lexicography (2012-2015), a research project led by principal investigator Dr Ulrich Pagel (Department of Religions and Philosophies) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Conference organisation
In addition to convening Tibetan Studies at SOAS, Nathan W. Hill organises the ERC-funded Asia Beyond Boundaries workshops. He has also organised the Circle of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies lecture series (2010-2015) as well as several conferences:
Recent Advances in Comparative Linguistic Reconstruction. SOAS. 26-27 March 2019.
Data Management in Asian Humanities and Social Sciences. SOAS. 13-14 November 2017.
Member, International Advisory Board for The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Art and Conservation at The Courtauld Institute of Art (2012-2016).
Editorial board member, Old Tibetan Documents Online, (2006-).
Iwao, Kazushi, Hill, Nathan W. and Takeuchi, Tsuguhito (2009). Tokyo: (Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)
The SIGTYP 2022 Shared Task on the Prediction of Cognate Reflexes
List, Johann-Mattis, Vylomova, Ekaterina, Forkel, Robert, Hill, Nathan W. and Cotterell, Ryan D., 2022, Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP 2022), pp 52-62
Proceedings of the IATS 2022 Panel on Tibetan Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing
Meleen, Marieke, (eds.), Hill, Nathan W., (eds.) and Faggianato, Christian, (eds.) (2024). Paris: UMR 8155 du CNRS (CRCAO). (Revue d'Etudes Tibétaines)
Special issue on Tibetan Natural Language Processing
Hill, Nathan W., (eds.) and Long, Congjun, (eds.) (2021). New York: Association for Computing Machinery. (ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing. Vol. 20 (2))
Origin of the r- allomorph of the Tibetan causative s-
Hill, Nathan W. (2023). In: Schaeffer, Kurtis, (eds.), McGrath, William, (eds.) and Liang, Jue, (eds.), Histories of Tibet: Essays in honor of Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp. New York: Wisdom Publications, pp 106-114
Hill, Nathan W. (2022). In: Marciniak, Katarzyna, (eds.), Kania, Stanisław Jan, (eds.), Wielińska-Soltwedel, Małgorzata, (eds.) and Bareja-Starzyńska, Agata, (eds.), Guruparamparā: Studies on Buddhism, India, Tibet, and more in honour of Professor Marek Mejor. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, pp 157-160
Scholarship on Trans-Himalayan (Tibeto-Burman) languages of South East Asia
Hill, Nathan W. (2021). In: Sidwell, Paul, (eds.) and Jenny, Mathias, (eds.), The Languages and Linguistics of Mainland Southeast Asia. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp 111-138
Hill, Nathan W. and Garrett, Edward (2017). In: Hanks, Patrick, (eds.) and de Schryver, Gilles-Maurice, (eds.), International Handbook of Modern Lexis and Lexicography. Berlin: Springer Nature, pp 1-11
The contribution of Tibetan languages to the study of evidentiality
Hill, Nathan W. and Gawne, Lauren (2017). In: Gawne, Lauren, (eds.) and Hill, Nathan W., (eds.), Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp 1-38
Simon, Camille and Hill, Nathan W. (2015). In: Grandi, Nicola, (eds.) and Körtvélyessy, Livia, (eds.), Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp 381-388
Garrett, Edward and Hill, Nathan W. (2015). In: Bick, Eckhard, (eds.) and Hagen, Kristin, (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on “Constraint Grammar - methods, tools and applications” at NODALIDA 2015, May 11-13, 2015. Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language, pp 19-22
Hill, Nathan W. (2014). In: Simmons, Richard VanNess, (eds.) and van Auken, Newell Ann, (eds.), Studies in Chinese and Sino-Tibetan Linguistics: Dialect, Phonology, Transcription and Text. Tapei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, pp 167-178
Hill, Nathan W. (2014). In: Lieber, Rochelle, (eds.) and Štekauer, Pavol, (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 620-630
A Gter ma of Negatives. H.E. Richardson's photographic negatives of manuscript copies of Tibetan Imperial Inscriptions possibly collected by Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu in the 18th Century CE recently found in the Bodleian Library, Oxford
Manson, Charles and Hill, Nathan W. (2014). In: Tropper, Kurt, (ed.), Epigraphic Evidence in the Pre-modern Buddhist World: Proceedings of the Eponymous Conference Held in Vienna, 14-15 Oct. 2011. Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistischen Studien, Universität Wien., pp 83-115
Owen-Smith, Tom and Hill, Nathan W. (2014). In: Owen-Smith, Tom, (eds.) and Hill, Nathan W., (eds.), Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and Descriptive Linguistics of the Himalayan Area. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp 1-10
Hill, Nathan W. and Fee, Toby (2013). In: Schaeffer, Kurtis R., (eds.), Kapstein, Matthew, (eds.) and Tuttle, Gray, (eds.), Sources of the Tibetan Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, pp 557-559
Come as lord of the black-headed: an Old Tibetan mythic formula
Hill, Nathan W. (2013). In: Cüppers, Christoph, (eds.), Mayer, Robert, (eds.) and Walter, Michael, (eds.), Tibet after Empire Culture, Society and Religion between 850-1000. Lumbini: Lumbini International Research Institute, pp 169-179
The Emergence of the Pluralis majestatis and the Relative Chronology of Old Tibetan Texts
Hill, Nathan W. (2013). In: Ehrhard, Franz-Karl, (eds.) and Maurer, Petra, (eds.), Nepalica-Tibetica: Festgabe for Christoph Cüppers. Andiast: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, pp 249-262
The allative, locative, and terminative cases (la-don) in the Old Tibetan Annals
Hill, Nathan W. (2011). In: Imaeda, Yoshiro, (eds.) and Kapstein, Matthew, (eds.), New Studies in the Old Tibetan Documents: Philology, History and Religion. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, pp 3-38
Hill, Nathan W. (2008). In: Beckwith, Christopher I., (ed.), Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages III. Bonn: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies Gmbh, pp 71-86
An Introduction to the text of the Newly Discovered Khrom chen Stele [Translation of 'gsar du rnyed pa'i khrom chen rdo ring yi ge mtshams sbyor' by Pa tshab pa sang dbang 'dus]
Review of: Andrew B. Liu: Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asia Institute of Columbia University.) xi, 360 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. $50. ISBN 978 0 30024373 4.
Hill, Nathan W. (2023). Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (86) 1, pp 198-200
Egophoricity. Simeon Floyd, Elisabeth Norcliffe, and Lila San Roque, eds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Typological Studies in Language, 118] 2018. vii, 505 pp
Hill, Nathan W. (2020). Linguistic Typology (24) 1, pp 201-208
Review of North East Indian Linguistics: Volume 3. Gwendolyn Hyslop, Stephen Morey, and Mark W. Post, eds. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India Pvt. Ltd. 2011.
Hill, Nathan W. (2012). European Bulletin of Himalayan research (40), pp 134-138
Review of Christine Sommerschuh, Einführung in die tibetische Schriftsprache: Lehrbuch für den Unterricht und das vertiefende Selbststudium. Nordstedt: Books on Demand GmbH, 2008.
Hill, Nathan W. (2010). Indo-Iranian Journal (53) 3, pp 251-264
Review of Lauran R. Hartley and Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, editors. Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Hill, Nathan W. (2010). China Review International (16) 2, pp 185-189
Review of Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction. By James A. Matisoff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003
Hill, Nathan W. (2009). 語言暨語言學 / Languages and Linguistics (10) 1, pp 173-195
Are ethnic tensions on the rise in China? A Chinafile conversation
Han, Enze, Palmer, James, Barnett, Robert, Bequelin, Nicholas, Millward, James A., Harris, Rachel, Leibold, James, Bulag, Uradyn E., Hill, Nathan W., Sperling, Elliot, Shakya, Tsering and Yeh, Emily T. (2014).
