Dr. Dan Davidson

Dr. Dan Davidson (Ph.D., Slavic Languages, Harvard University) is Senior Academic Advisor and President Emeritus of the American Councils for International Education (Washington, D. C.) and Emeritus Professor of Russian and Second Language Acquisition, Myra T. Cooley Lectureship, Bryn Mawr Coll ge. He is the author or editor of 24 books and 69 scholarly articles focused on Russian, second language acquisition, and international education development, including a series of empirical studies of the federally-sponsored advanced-level acquisition overseas immersion programs for Arabic, Chinese, and Russian language and culture. His most recent studies include contributions to H. Kahn & D. Cohn (Eds.), International Education at the Crossroads, Indiana University Press (2021), and Transformative Language Learning and Teaching, Cambridge University Press, which Davidson also co-edited.

In 2015, Davidson was named by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to the Commission on Languages. He was also an elected foreign member of the Russian Academy of Education, the Ukrainian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and past chair of the College Board World Languages Advisory Committee, the Joint National Committee for Languages, the Alliance for International Education Exchange, the Board of Governors of the European Humanities University, the University of California Language and International Studies Consortium and the National Examination Board of Kyrgyzstan.

Davidson is co-founder of the American Councils for International Education (1974) and has served as U.S. co-chair of the “Transformation of the Humanities and Social Sciences Programs” in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, as well as a member of the working groups of the U.S.-Russia and U.S.-Polish Bilateral Presidential Commissions on Innovation/Higher Education.