Early life and education
Turin was born into an Italian-Dutch family, and raised in the United Kingdom and briefly in New York. His Italian father, Duccio Turin, was a UN diplomat and chief architect of the Palestinian refugee camps. His Dutch mother, Hannah Oorthuys, is a graphic designer and therapist, and the daughter of the photographer Cas Oorthuys. Turin's half-brother is Luca Turin, a biophysicist and writer with a long-standing interest in bioelectronics, the sense of smell, perfumery, and the fragrance industry.
After attending University College School, and completing his undergraduate studies in Anthropology and Archaeology with First Class Honours from the University of Cambridge (1995), he completed his PhD at the University of Leiden, graduating in 2006.
Career
Mark Turin is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. His work is centered on Indigenous language endangerment, reclamation, and revitalization.
Linguistics and Anthropology
For his doctoral research at the University of Leiden through the Himalayan Languages Project, Turin worked collaboratively with the Indigenous Thangmi (Thami) speaking community in Nepal and Northern India to create a grammatical description and lexicon of the previously undocumented language. This work resulted in a Nepali-Thami-English dictionary published in 2004 [2] and a grammar of the Thangmi language published in 2012. [3] Turin’s interest in Himalayan culture and language took him to Bhutan, where he was one of three principal investigators on a five-year collaborative project to record and preserve the endangered oral traditions of the nation. [4] He has also conducted research in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China and in the Indian state of Sikkim. Since 2015, Turin has worked in collaborative partnership with the Heiltsuk First Nation through a Language Mobilization Partnership, of which the University of British Columbia is a member. [5]
Policy and Practice
In 2007, Turin established and directed the Translation and Interpretation Unit in the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), [6] a special political mission mandated by the UN Security Council to support Nepal’s peace process. Turin has occasionally worked as a consultant for the World Bank and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).
Collaborative Research and Digital Humanities
Turin has been involved in many long term research projects and initiatives. In 2000, he co-founded the Digital Himalaya Project as a platform for multimedia resources from the Himalayan region. [7] Turin directs the World Oral Literature Project which he established at the University of Cambridge in 2009. Since 2019, Turin has served as the principal investigator for the Relational Lexicography Project, a framework and toolkit for collaborative, community-informed dictionary work with marginalized languages. [8] Turin is one of the project leads on a free interactive digital map of the languages of New York City, one of the most linguistically diverse metropolitan areas in the world. [9]
From 2013 to 2017, together with Sienna Craig, Turin served as editor of Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Turin's BBC Radio 4 series, Our Language in Your Hands, aired in December 2012, and his second series, On Language Location, on the linguistic landscape of Bhutan and Burma/Myanmar aired in October 2014 on BBC Radio 4 and in March 2015 on the BBC World Service. Turin is founding editor of the World Oral Literature Series with the Cambridge-based Open Book Publishers, which aims to preserve and promote the oral literatures of Indigenous communities in innovative, responsive, ethical and culturally-appropriate ways.
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