Per Urlaub

Professor Per Urlaub is Director of Global Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches German, European Studies, translation studies, and second language studies. He investigates the impact of technology on how languages are used and learned. Before joining MIT in 2022, he was a faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin and at Middlebury College, where he served as Associate Dean of the Language Schools. The author of 50+ research publications and editor of three scholarly volumes, his research interests are located at the intersection of second language/literacy acquisition, intercultural development, translation studies, international education, reading research, and technology. A main strand of his earlier scholarship generated a more nuanced understanding of the process of literary reading in the second language. An authority on the strategic and intentional use of technology in higher education, his more recent scholarship focuses on investigating affordances and limitations of GIS, machine translation, and generative AI technologies in language education, area studies, intercultural learning, study abroad, and the humanities at large. He has given invited lectures and workshops at institutions such as Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Berkeley, Indiana, Vanderbilt, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD from Stanford University.