Professor Graham Furniss (chair)

Following the retirement of Professor Barry Supple, SOAS has appointed Professor Graham Furniss to be Chair of the ELDP Panel. Graham Furniss is the foundling Dean of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures and was first involved in the negotiations to house the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project at SOAS. He has also been Head of the Language Centre and was SOAS Director of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. He is a member of the University of London's Centre for African Studies and the British Academy's Africa Panel. He is also a former President of he African Studies Asssociation of the UK (ASAUK) and Vice-Chair of the Royal African Society. Graham's own research is in literatures in African languages, Hausa in particular. He has published on aspects of Hausa, African oral literatures and orality more generally. His most recent monograph was published by Palgrave Macmillan and is entitled, `Orality: the Power of the Spoken Word'.