I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1950, a third-generation German-American. After
graduating from St. Xavier High school in Cincinnati (1968), I attended John
Carroll University in Cleveland, Oho and the Rome campus of Loyola University,
graduating with a BA in English and French in 1972.
The year after college, I studied General Linguistics and Psychology at the
University of Geneva on a Fulbright grant. Then, after a year in the "real world"
(selling books for Little, Brown; delivering mail for the US Postal Service), I began
graduate school. Following an MA degree in Linguistics (University of Florida,
1975), I obtained MA and PhD degrees (1977, 1979), also in Linguistics, from
Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
As far as I know, my Ph.D thesis at Indiana was the first to focus on phonetic
aspects of second language acquisition. Having developed a taste for empirical
research, and finding little of interest to me in the field of Linguistics, I spent three
years as an NIH post-doctoral trainee in Speech and Hearing Sciences, first at
University of Florida (1980), and then at Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois (1981-1982).
Following three years of post-doctoral research, I became an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Biocommunication at the University of Alabama at
Birmingham (UAB).
There were a number of things that made my first (and, as it turned out, only)
academic job unusual. The first was the name of the department I joined. At most
other universities, it would have been called "Speech and Hearing Sciences".
Another was its location: a School of Medicine in the Deep South. The most
important and unique aspect of my new job, however, was its very nature. I had
somehow managed to find a job that, by all rights, could not possibly exist: a hard
money, tenure track position with access to good research facilities and no
teaching responsibilities!
Given my lack of interest in the things that most Southern men enjoy (football,
hunting, fishing, NASCAR racing), I was left with a dangerous amount of free time
on my hands. I used a lot of that time to write grant proposals. Despite the lack of
previous experience, I turned out to be good at it, and managed to obtain my first
research grant from the National Institutes of Health less than two years after
arriving in Birmingham.
The funds provided by this initial NIH grant, and those that followed, allowed me to
recruit a number of very capable and energetic young researchers from the US,
Europe, and Japan. The NIH grants also allowed me and my research team to
venture beyond Birmingham in order to recruit participants for behavioral research
examining L2 speech learning. We collected data in various American states and
Puerto Rico, and also in Canada, France, Sweden, Japan, Australia, Finland, Italy
and The Netherlands.
My academic career flourished. We moved into a larger lab, and I was promoted to
full Professor in 1995.
With Grace Yeni-Komshian of the University of Maryland, I carried out a
large-scale study of Korean immigrants to the US. With Ian R. A. MacKay, I carried
out major research examining Italian immigrants living in the Ottawa, ON region.
Contact with the native Italian participants in our Ottawa research, and exposure to
large doses of Italian-accented English--one of the variables we studied in that
research--made me yearn to return to Italy. In 1995, I spent a part-year sabbatical
at the Phonetics Institute of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Padua,
Italy. Thereafter, I became a frequent visitor to Italy.
Several years later I met my future wife, Tullia, in Rome, and began visiting Italy
with EVEN greater frequency. As my research career at UAB approached its end, I
had the opportunity, thanks to Cristina Burani, to spend a year as a visiting
researcher at the CNR in Rome. I began telling people that I "commuted" between
Birmingham, Alabama and Rome. I read American newspapers flying East, and
Italian newspapers flying West and, before I knew it, I had become Gold Medallion
frequent flyer on Delta.
The periods I spent in Italy gradually grew longer. Tullia and I were married in the
Spring of 2005. At some point I stopped visiting Italy, and began "visiting" the
United States.
One morning as I travelled by bus in Rome to the CNR, I came to a startling
realization: the professor who had spent a career studying immigrants to North
America had himself become an immigrant. An unintentional immigrant, to be sure,
but a an immigrant nevertheless and in every sense of the word.
I retired from UAB in 2006 and became a resident of Tuscania in the same year.
I've been quite lucky to have the opportunity to experience first hand something I
studied for so many years, to see what its like from the inside out to struggle to
make sense of the world around me and to communicate in a tongue that is not my
own. Yet.