Steven Darian is Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ.
Darian’s Ph.D. is from New York University, in Applied Linguistics. He has used language as his Archimedes fulcrum, to dig into everything from science to religion. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. He has been lucky enough to have had 3 Fulbrights, and has lived, worked, and studied in 9 or 10 countries. He has written a dozen books, both scholarly and popular; the last one being The Wanderer: Travels & Adventures Beyond the Pale. The next, The Heretic’s Book of Death & Laughter: The Role of Religion in Just About Everything, is due out later this year.
Work for CID:
Steven Darian wrote a guest post, and described his Fulbright experience in Uzbekistan, 1997-1998.
The Fulbright was for someone to teach courses in management at the Tashkent Institute of Finance. I had a keen cultural interest in Central Asia, but my Ph.D. was in Applied Linguistics, & most of my teaching dealt with the English language, with courses like applied linguistics, fiction, & non-fiction writing, I also taught an MBA course in business communication. In my Fulbright application, I stressed the fact that an American business professor teaching in a place like Tashkent would be faced with serious comprehension problems from his students, especially since management has its share of jargon and technical terms. I offered to prepare a book for management students who were also nonnative speakers of English. I was also lucky enough to have had a previous Fulbright, plus several other long-term overseas ESL teaching assignments (in Afghanistan, Saudi, & Indonesia). At any rate, the Fulbright came through, and I arrived in Tashkent with copies of the book (later published as English for Decision-Makers: A Course in Modern Management).
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 