I have had the immense good fortune to enjoy a career spanning three fields of activity.  As a university professor I have engaged in teaching and research in Slavic linguistics, textual analysis and cultural history, with foreign language instructional innovation as a secondary field.  As a United Nations Research Officer I carried out research, analysis and investigations related to recent events of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the propaganda and incitement that feed these phenomena.  Finally, as a professor again, primarily in leadership roles at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, I developed programs, instructional practices and instructional support, all in support of the United States Defense Foreign Language Program.  The goals of these latter undertakings, carried out through managerial, consultative and mentoring activity, were to “push the envelope” in realizing the language learning potential of adult learners with maximized efficiency and minimized attrition, and to produce mission-ready language professionals for military and government agencies.

At each career stage I have developed research and analysis agendas based on the topics and issues that demanded my daily attention.  At every step along the way, connections between these diverse topics have continuously drawn my attention.  There has never been enough time to address all of these.  My latter two career stages especially—as a United Nations research officer and in leadership positions at the Defense Language Institute—required me to maintain a laser focus on the mission requirements of these institutions.  This made it extremely difficult to maintain a program of original research even on current topics, much less return to earlier projects left behind at each career shift. As a result, topics have accumulated, and at each change of professional direction I have left numerous projects incomplete.  My intention has always been to return to complete these projects and to draw out their occasionally striking links and implications, but it ultimately became clear that a return to more-or-less to full time scholarship would have to remain a project for my emeritus years.

While some of the central insights arising from my work have been limited to a single field, as often as not they have had cross-over relevance, forming a nexus of ideas that unite multiple fields, and often aid in interpreting current events.  One striking example arises from research into propaganda, incitement and ideological radicalization in the former Yugoslavia while I served as a Research Officer for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.  This work has proven relevant to understanding similar phenomena arising, perhaps more strikingly today than in the past, in the United States.  A full and objective appreciation of what has occurred in both settings, in turn, can only be achieved by rigorously applying textual analysis techniques developed in the “musty” academic milieu.  Appreciation of the discourse and rhetorical strategies that underlie these phenomena proves to be crucial, further down the line, in the field of foreign language learning.  It is important already at the Superior (Level 3 or professional) level of proficiency which is the objective for various academic and government language programs.  It is critical, however, for developing the cross-cultural competence, meta-linguistic awareness and communicative strategies that characterize the elite proficiency levels that are so important for military and other government linguists in certain high-stakes roles.  Similarly, my experiences carrying out a variety of analytic tasks in my United Nations role (in some cases the same as those facing future military language professionals) directly informed my work at the Defense Language Institute.  Possessing a first-hand understanding of the linguistic, contextual and task-related complexities facing these language professionals in real-world situations proved invaluable in developing programs and instructional practices (for example, in designing scenario-based foreign language training).

These circumstances led to the idea for this site and informed its structure.  Along with a collection of papers and presentations spanning the three “realms” of my activity, the site also includes a compendium of leading and crossover Insights and Motifs drawn from across these “realms,” as well as the Textual Times which attempts to apply as many as possible of these leading ideas to current events and developments.