Prof. Dr. Andrew Harvey studied French and Linguistics at Memorial University, Canada during his Bachelor's course, pivoting to African languages during a Master's degree at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and SOAS University of London, in the United Kingdom. During this time, his focus was on the documentation and description of the Gorwaa language, spoken in and around Babati district in central Tanzania.
From 2018 to 2019, Harvey was a Junior Fellow at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, where, at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA), he expanded his focus to the analysis of another central Tanzanian language: Ihanzu – spoken in Mkalama district. From late 2019 to the end of 2021, Harvey was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leiden University, the Netherlands, where he developed and coordinated a large community-led project to document both Gorwaa and Ihanzu, as well as a third language of central Tanzania: Hadza.
Harvey's interests include the languages of the Tanzanian rift, their documentation and description, their morphosyntax, and the histories and cultures of their speaker communities, especially as evinced through linguistic arts and language contact. He helps develop and maintain three large multi-use digital collections of Gorwaa, Hadza, and Ihanzu language and cultural material, sponsored and hosted by the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), and supports collaborative interdisciplinary research with the Rift Valley Network (RVN).
Prof. Harvey talks about his topics and projects at the University of Bayreuth in this video: