Ross Perlin is co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), a nonprofit research institute dedicated to documenting and supporting endangered languages in New York City and beyond, and a lecturer in linguistics at Columbia University. At ELA, he launched the Languages of New York City Map and has managed various projects focused on language documentation, language policy, and public programming around urban linguistic diversity. Perlin holds a BA from Stanford, an M.Phil. from Cambridge, and MA from the University of London (SOAS), and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Bern. He has published articles and translations in the New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. He is the author of Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (Verso, 2011) and Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York (Grove, 2024), which won the 2024 British Academy Book Prize.
At the Academy, Perlin is working on his third book, “The Jesus Film: On Universal Translation, Endangered Languages, and Holy Writ in the Age of AI.” The book will trace the history of an obscure two-hour movie, an American Biblical drama known as “the Jesus film.” Shot in Palestine and Israel, “JESUS” was co-directed by Peter Sykes and John Krish, and produced by John Heyman, a German-Jewish child refugee turned Hollywood maverick, with financing from American evangelicals. The film flopped at the box office upon its release in 1979 but caught the attention of missionary organizations bent on bringing the gospel into all 7,168 spoken and signed languages. With translations in over 2,000 languages, the film’s screenplay is today the world’s most translated text, and four billion people have reportedly watched “JESUS” a total of eight billion times, making it the most watched motion picture in history. Furthermore, Meta, Google, and OpenAI are reportedly using the film to train their models on less common languages. Perlin’s project takes the film and its broader impact as a point of departure for an alternative history of translation, a new genealogy of linguistics, and a sidelong meditation on the Large Language Models behind AI.
In Berlin, Perlin will conduct archival research at the Berliner Missionswerk, and deepen a long-standing collaboration with the Endangered Language Documentation Programme, housed at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Meet Ross Perlin
A short portrait filmed at the Hans Arnhold Center, introducing the work and ideas behind fellows’ projects in Berlin.
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The Jesus Film: On Universal Translation, Endangered Languages, and the Holy Writ in the Age of AI
The most translated text in the world, available in over 2000 languages from every country? “The Jesus film.”
Fellow Spotlight: Ross Perlin
Ross Perlin is co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a research institute dedicated to documenting endangered languages in New York City and beyond.
Explore Past Fellows
Hakim Abderrezak
Marco Abel
David Abraham
