Istvan Kecskes is Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York, USA. He teaches graduate courses in pragmatics, second language acquisition and bilingualism at SUNY, Albany. Professor Kecskes is the President of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA) and the CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research) Association. He is the founder and co-director of the Barcelona Summer School on Bi- and Multilingualism, and the founder and co-director of Sorbonne, Paris – SUNY, Albany Graduate Student Symposium.

 His book “Foreign language and mother tongue” co-authored by Tunde Papp and published by Erlbaum in 2000 was the first book that described the effect of the second language on the first language based on a longitudinal research. Dr. Kecskes’ book “Intercultural Pragmatics” published by Oxford University Press in 2014 is considered a groundbreaking monograph that shapes research in the field. His latest books are “Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics” published by Benjamins in 2017, “Explorations in Chinese as a Second Language” published by Springer in 2017 and “Key Issues in Chinese as a Second Language published by Routledge in 2017. His new book titled “English as a Lingua Franca: The pragmatic perspective” was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2019.

Dr. Kecskes is the founding editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics and the Mouton Series in Pragmatics published by Mouton de Gruyter, as well as the bilingual (Chinese-English) journal CASLAR (Chinese as a Second Language Research) published by DeGruyter and the co-founding editor of “Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict” published by John Benjamins: Amsterdam.

Dr. Kecskes received a Senior Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in the Rockefeller Research Center in Bellagio, Italy in 2004, a Senior Fellowship from the Mitteleuropa Foundation, Bolzano, Italy in 2005, a Honorary Professorship from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou in 2009, a Yunshan Chair Professorship from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China in 2011, a Distinguished Visiting Professorship from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2013 and a Guest Professorship from the University of Messina in May, 2017 and 2019. Professor Kecskes has also been an Honorary Professor at the National Research Tomsk State University, Russia where a Graduate Student Award and Scholarship was named after him in 2016.