Bio: (Ph.D. Harvard, Slavic Languages) is now emeritus professor of Russian and SLA at Bryn Mawr, where he served as Department Chair, taught undergraduate and graduate courses and directed or co-directing 37 Ph.D. dissertations. He is author, co-author or editor of twenty-four textbooks and academic collections and 50 scholarly articles in the fields of language, culture, and second language acquisition, including a landmark 20-year longitudinal investigation of adult second language acquisition in the overseas immersion context. His most recent study, “What Makes Study Abroad Transformative? Comparing Linguistic and Cultural Contacts and Learning Outcomes (Arabic, Chinese, Russian) in Virtual vs In-Person Contexts,” appeared in UC Berkeley L2 Journal, Vol 15, Issue 2 (2023).
Dr. Davidson is founding president of the American Councils for International Education and current Director of the American Councils Research Center in Washington. Under his leadership American Councils developed into a premier federally-funded academic exchange and training organization focused on the development of advanced-level overseas immersion training in the less commonly taught languages: Arabic, Chinese and Russian, as well as African languages, South Asian languages, Farsi, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese, programs that currently provide full overseas study support to 1,400 US students annually. The organization’s association division, the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR), is dedicated to strengthening the study and teaching of the languages and cultures of the Russophone world in the US.
Dr. Davidson served as a member and chair of the College Board World Language Academic Advisory Committee and was elected president of the Joint National Committee for Languages (JNCL), chair of the Alliance for International Education and Cultural Exchange, vice-chair of the Board of Governors of the European Humanities University (Vilnius), vice president of the International Association of Teachers of Russian Language and Literature (MAPRIAL), founding chair of the Board of the Center for Educational Testing and Methodology (Kyrgyzstan), the first independent educational testing center in Central Asia, and member of the Commission on Language Learning in America, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Davidson is an elected foreign member of the Russian and the Ukrainian Academies of Education and recipient of an honorary professorship from Kyrgyz National University (Bishkek) and of honorary doctoral degrees from Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (2022), the Abai State Pedagogical University (1998), 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, the American Council of Teachers of Russian (2015), the Language Flagship (2017), lifetime awardee for advocacy from the Joint National Committee of Languages (2023) and the MLA 2023 Kenneth Mildenberger Prize with Betty Lou Leaver and Christine Campbell for Transformative Language Learning and Teaching (Cambridge University Press, 2021
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