Professor Per Urlaub is Director of Global Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches German and second language studies and investigates the impact of technology on languages usage, language acquisition, literacy, and intercultural development. 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 numerous research publications and editor of three scholarly volumes, his research interests are located at the intersection of second language acquisition, literacy research, intercultural development, translation studies, international education, and technology. A main strand of his earlier scholarship generated a more nuanced understanding of the process of literary reading in the second language and directly impacted instruction and curriculum in post-secondary education. An authority on the strategic use of technology in higher education, his more recent scholarship focuses on investigating affordances and limitations of machine translation, generative AI, and geoinformatics in language education, intercultural learning, study abroad, and the humanities at large. Lastly, he is currently developing a digital humanities project focusing on the EU-funded “European Capital of Culture”-program that aims at generating a shared continental cultural identity in an era of growing nationalism in individual member states. He has shared his ideas with audiences at conferences around the world and given invited lectures and workshops domestically 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.

Education:
PhD Stanford University