Faculty of Languages appoints new honorary doctors

Geoffrey Khan, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, UK, is a leading researcher in several fields within the Semitic languages. In philology and linguistics he has studied Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, and his research has dealt with everything from Hebrew text history and medieval Arabic publishing and grammar to documentation of Neo-Aramaic dialects. He has made great efforts to document threatened dialects within the north-eastern Neo-Aramaic, which was originally spoken in northern Iraq, southeast Turkey and western Iran. Professor Khan has also produced extensive grammatical descriptions and found an interest in Biblical Hebrew. He has a long relation to Semitic languages in Uppsala and has participated in seminars and workshops, and has received PhD students from Uppsala in Cambridge. He is a close partner, not least within Neo-Aramaic research.

Laurent Gosselin, Professor of French Linguistics at the University of Rouen, is one of France’s most prominent linguists, especially when it comes to research on grammatical tense, aspect and mood in French. The relationship between these three is a classic and insufficiently studied problem which requires extensive knowledge of philosophical, psychological, linguistic and semiotic literature on the subject. While he has specifically applied his theoretical systems to French, they have a high degree of applicability and have therefore been used by other researchers on languages such as Arabic and Japanese. Professor Gosselin has since 25 years been an important member of the French Romance Linguistics Network in Uppsala and has in several ways worked together with Uppsala researchers.

The Conferment Ceremony will be held in the University Main Building on 26 January 2018.