Dr Ghil'ad Zuckermann (AD 87-89) is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics and holder of a prestigious ARC (Australian Research Council) Discovery Fellowship, The University of Queensland, Australia.

 
Previously Ghil’ad was the Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge and affiliated with the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Studies, University of Cambridge.

 
After graduating from Adriatic College, Ghil’ad completed his military service in Israel and was then selected for the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Programme for Outstanding Students of Tel Aviv University, where he specialised in linguistics, philosophy and psychology, receiving his M.A. (summa cum laude) from the Department of Linguistics in 1997.  As Scatcherd European Scholar of the University of Oxford and Denise Skinner Graduate Scholar of St Hugh's College, Oxford, Ghil’ad attended St Hugh's College, Oxford, where he gained his DPhil, entitled 'Camouflaged Borrowing: "Folk-Etymological Nativization" in the Service of Puristic Language Engineering', in 2000. 

 

Ghil’ad has taught various undergraduate and graduate courses in four continents, for example at the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Oriental Studies), National University of Singapore, University of Miami and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He has also been research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Study and Conference Center (Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy), Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University), Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin) and Kokuritu Kokugo Kenkyuuzyo (National Language Research Institute, Tokyo). He has held a range of fellowships and scholarships, including a British Academy Research Grant, Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harold Hyam Wingate Scholarship, British Chevening Scholarship and Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst Scholarship.

 

He has published in English, Israeli ('Ivrit'), Italian, Yiddish, Spanish, German and Russian. One of his recent books Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, came out in 2003 and he is currently preparing a further volume entitled Mosaic or mosaic?: The Genesis of the Israeli Language.

“I heard about UWC from a friend’s relative, as well as from an article in the most popular Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Akharonot.  UWC was immensely different from my earlier schooling, it was worldly rather than parochial and with a didactic emphasis on quality rather than on quantity. This is not to say that I did not enjoy my high school in Israel but it is like comparing a Ferrari to a Skoda”. states Ghil’ad
 
UWC has had a huge impact on my life. Just to give you an example: I married a Shanghainese woman whom I met at Oxford. We have just had our first child: a son born on 11 July 2007. His name is very indicative and very UWC: Giulio Xingtian Yehuda Zuckermann. Giulio is Italian, Xingtian is Mandarin (meaning “sky walker, world traveller, one who can do things with no boundaries!!!) and Yehuda is Hebrew. Zuckermann, lit. “sugar man” is German Jewish.
 
“One of my favourite memories from my time at UWC is singing as baritone in the UWCAD choir – with Maestro Piero Poclen, a mentch! May he rest in peace.

 
Prof. Zuckermann's work is revolutionizing the way people analyse hybrid languages in general and Semito-European Israeli (according to Zuckermann, somewhat misleadingly a.k.a. ‘Modern Hebrew’) in particular.  He is also involved in changing the way linguists and lexicographers analyse words deriving from several sources simultaneously.