Instructor Profiles

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Joanna Bialek (PhD in Tibetology, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany; Postdoc at Trinity  College Dublin) is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the project ‘Tibetan Obsolete Mortuary practices and afterlife Beliefs’ (TOMB) at Trinity College Dublin. She is working at the crossroads of historical linguistics and religious studies. She has published Compounds and Compounding in Old Tibetan and A Textbook in Classical Tibetan, as  well as articles on Old Tibetan, history of the Tibetan Empire, Dunhuang manuscripts, and  funerary practices on the Tibetan Plateau.
https://tcd.academia.edu/JoannaBialek
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8542-4272

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Nathan Hill (PhD in Tibetology, Harvard University; Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies,  Trinity College Dublin) researches Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics. He has  published on Old Tibetan descriptive linguistics, Tibetan corpus linguistics, Tibeto-Burman  reconstruction and comparative linguistics, the history of Chinese, and the typology of  evidential systems. He has led research projects funded by the European Research Council,  the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the British Academy.
His books include The Historical Phonology of Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese (2019), A Lexicon of  Tibetan Verb Stems as Reported by the Grammatical Tradition (2010), and Old Tibetan Inscriptions, co-authored with Kazushi Iwao (2009). His edited books include Evidential Systems of Tibetan Languages, with Lauren Gawne (2017).
https://tcd.academia.edu/NathanWHill

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Yue JI (Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna) is a PhD candidate and DOC Fellow  of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the University of Vienna. His doctoral project, The  Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā in Tangut Translation, investigates both the philological and  linguistic aspects of Tangut through comparative study on multilingual parallel texts in Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese. In addition to Tangut, his research interests also include the  linguistics and philology of Ancient Chinese and Indo-European languages in the Eastern Silk Road.
https:ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/persons/yue-ji
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2298-7745
https://univie.academia.edu/YueJi

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Liwen Liu received her PhD in the Study of Religion from the University of Toronto and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Newar Studies at SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on the diachronic development of Classical Newar, and she is working on creating a Newar language corpus by digitising manuscripts to support linguistic, literary, and religious studies. Her broader interests include Newar studies, ritual studies, Sanskrit intellectual history, and Tantric traditions.
https://utoronto.academia.edu/LiwenLiu

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Josiah Medin is a PhD candidate in the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies. His project, entitled A Descriptive Grammar of the Old Meitei Language as Attested in the Numit Kappa and the Cheitharol Kumpapa, concerns the description of the linguistic features of the oldest attested stage of the Meitei language of Manipur, Northeast India, and of the changes that the language underwent in its development into its modern form. His research combines descriptive linguistics, historical phonology, morphology, syntax, palaeography, and epigraphy to date and describe the contents of manuscripts and inscriptions from pre-colonial Manipur.
https://tcd.academia.edu/JosiahMedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josiah-medin-9216b8264/

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Jinqi Ying is a PhD candidate in the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies with the project Reconstructing the Initials of Old Chinese through the Philology of Excavated Documents. Her research focuses on the phonological reconstruction of Old Chinese, specifically examining the consonant clusters and phonetic components used in ancient Chinese characters. Her work bridges the gap between phonologists and philologists by utilising newly excavated texts to resolve long-standing controversies in the pronunciation of Old Chinese. Her  expertise includes Chinese philology and palaeography, with a particular interest in the  application of rigorous methodological practices to ancient linguistic data.