About

I was born in Finsterwalde one early morning in the last century, stayed home with my mom, went to school, left town, got a degree as a Diplomlehrer of German and Russian from a teacher training college, which is now part of the Universität Leipzig . As part of these studies, I spent ten months in my third year at the Калужский государственный педагогический университет in Kaluga, Russia. I left Germany about one year after unification and went to England and worked (part-time) as a Lecturer in German at what became Sunderland University while I was there. Then I got a faculty position and spent three years lecturing German and Linguistics at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Between 1995 and 2001, I was a lecturer in German Linguistics and CALL in the Centre for Computational Linguistics at UMIST in Manchester, where I also obtained my PhD in Language Engineering (Applied Linguistics).

Between 2001 and 2017, I worked as a professor of German (Applied Linguistics)  at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo.  I also served as the director of  the Waterloo Centre for German Studies from 2009 to 2017. Between 2011 and 2018, I was the co-editor of CALICO Journal, which is published by Equinox Publishing Co. and is the society journal of the North American association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning or CALICO. Since 2017, I live and work in San Diego. Here, I am the co-director of the Language Acquisition Resource Center (SDSU-LARC) and a professor of German and European Studies in the Department of European Studies at San Diego State University.

I use some of my non-work time to write and blog in the Texterium as well as non-fictional texts at https://pantarhei.press.

If you’d like to know more about the research and teaching in my day job, just click … on research and teaching. It takes you to the other site.