Location
Age
Area of FocusAbout Getatchew's Work
Getatchew Haile is a philologist and linguist of modern and ancient Ethiopian languages and literature, whose research and publications help to preserve Ethiopian and Oriental Christian traditions.
Haile is the Regents Professor of Medieval Studies and Cataloguer of Oriental Manuscripts at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, which supports, among other projects, a landmark microfilming effort aimed at making ancient literature more accessible for scholarly investigation. He has catalogued more than 5,000 manuscripts and has published ten catalogues describing these Ethiopic manuscripts on microfilm. Among the manuscripts are the oldest texts of virtually every book of the Ethiopic Old Testament, including important intertestamental books such as the Book of Enoch, which survived in its entirety only in Ethiopia. He has also written many articles on Ethiopian Studies.
Biography
He taught for over ten years at the Haile Sellassie I (now Addis Ababa) University in Ethiopia, before he moved to the United States in 1976. Haile is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
Haile received a B.A. (1957) from the American University in Cairo, a B.D. (1957) from the Coptic Theological College in Cairo, and a Ph.D. (1962) from the University of Tübingen.
Last updated January 1, 2005.
Published on August 1, 1988
