Dr Wiktor Gebski

PhD

College position:

College Research Associate

Wiktor Gebski
Wiktor Gebski

Dr Wiktor Gebski is a linguist specialising in Arabic dialectology and Hebrew. Hailing from Poland, he completed his BA and MA in Hebrew and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Warsaw. Between 2014 and 2016 he pursued Hebrew and Arabic studies at the University of Tel Aviv as a scholar of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2022 he gained his PhD from the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation The Jewish Dialect of Gabes (Southern Tunisia): Phonology, Morphology, Syntax was written under the supervision of Professor Geoffrey Khan. It entailed documentation of this endangered North-African Arabic dialect. The project was based on extensive fieldwork in Israel and France, during which Dr Gebski recorded the last native speakers of Jewish Gabes.

For his work towards the preservation of Jewish linguistic heritage, in 2022 he was awarded the Oliver Cromwell Prize in Jewish Studies. Currently, Dr Gebski is a Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellow at FAMES, Cambridge, where he teaches Modern Hebrew and conducts research on Jewish and Muslim varieties of spoken Maghrebi Arabic.

His academic interests involve language endangerment, the syntax of spoken Arabic, and language contact between Jewish dialects of Arabic and Israeli Hebrew.

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