Dan E. Davidson is Professor of Russian and Second Language Acquisition at Bryn Mawr College, where he has held the rank of full professor since 1983. He received the M.A. and Ph.D degrees in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and for the past twenty-eight years has served as national association head, faculty member, and academic administrator in the fields of Russian language and literature, Russian studies, and post-Soviet educational reform. Davidson is the author or editor of twenty-six books and more than 40 articles in the fields of Russian language, culture, and educational development, including a major seventeen-year longitudinal, empirically-based study of adult second language acquisition during study abroad. He has directed nineteen Ph.D. dissertations in the field of Russian and second-language acquisition at Bryn Mawr. From 1992-1995, Dr. Davidson also served as co-chairman of the Transformation of the Humanities and Social Sciences initiative sponsored by philanthropist George Soros. The program produced over four hundred textbooks for schools and colleges in Eurasia. Davidson came to Bryn Mawr in 1976 after having previously taught at Amherst College and Harvard University. He has been a visiting faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland, and Columbia University. He served as chairman of the Russian Department from 1978-1987.
Davidson is past chair of the Alliance for International Educational and Cultural Exchange, a member of the Foreign Language Committee of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), a member of the National Foreign Language Center's Board of Directors, a member of the Collaborative Board for U.S. National Foreign Language Standards, a current Trustee of World Education Services, and a past Trustee of the Barrie School in Silver Spring (MD). He is an elected foreign member of the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (RAO) and the recipient of honorary doctoral degrees from Almaty State University (Kazakhstan), the Russian Academy of Sciences (Division of Language and Literature), and the State University of World Languages (Uzbekistan). He has received awards for distinguished service to the profession from the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) in 1995 and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages of the Modern Language Association (ADFL/MLA) in 1997.
Davidson is co-founder and President of the American Councils for International Education. In its four decades, American Councils has become the premier American education and international training organizations, administering more than thirty exchange and training programs, including U.S. government programs and non-U.S. national fellowship programs. The organization focuses its expertise on the design and implementation of academic exchange, professional training, distance learning, curriculum and test development, delivery of technical assistance and consulting services, research and evaluation, and institution building. The American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR), a division of American Councils, is dedicated to strengthening the teaching of Russian language and literature throughout the United States. Davidson's current research focuses on the comparative, empirical analysis of word connotations in contemporary Russian and American English: his Bilingual Associative Dictionary of English is forthcoming in 2003, as is his most recent collection of articles on the acquisition of Russian in an immersion context. He currently heads a number of international projects concerned with educational reform, test development, and the formation of policies affecting the formal study of native languages, second languages and foreign languages in the U.S., Eastern Europe, and the states of Eurasia.
For more information about Dan Davidson check out the article in Bryn Mawr Now.
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