Marc L. Greenberg

Prof. Marc L. Greenberg received his MA at the University of Chicago (1984) and PhD at UCLA (1990), both in Slavic linguistics. With the guidance of mentors Henrik Birnbaum, Pavle Ivić, Ronelle Alexander, and Alan Timberlake, he studied Slavic (historical) accentology and dialectology. In 1988–1990 with a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship and a grant from the US Dept. of Education he conducted fieldwork in Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia) and Hungary. During this time, which coincided with the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe, he became engaged in issues of language planning in the reorganization of Yugoslavia and other-post socialist states. His research and teaching work continue to focus on diachrony and diatopy, as well as sociolinguistics. His research synthesizes techniques and learning from multiple disciplines to find novel ways of understanding and reconstructing language history, employing the comparative method, supplemented by sociolinguistics, geolinguistics, cognitive linguistics. His work mostly focused on Slavic languages and languages in contact with them (Romance, Germanic, Albanian, Finno-Ugric).​

He has worked at the University of Kansas as a faculty member since 1990 and was promoted to (Full) Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures in 2000, when he was also elected to chair of the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures (2000–2011). He has held several administrative positions at the University of Kansas, including Acting Associate Dean for Humanities (2012), Chair-Receiver for the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and recently served as the founding Director, School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, University of Kansas (2014–20). He has held numerous prestigious fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, US Department of Education, the Swiss Science Foundation, and the Moravian-Silesian Regional Research Fund. In 2017 he was elected to the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts as a Corresponding Member. In 2019 he was recognized as the first non-Slovene Ambassador of Science of the Republic of Slovenia.

Among his prominent and recent publications are books: The Sociolinguistics of Slovene (as editor) (= Int’l Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 124, 1997); A Historical Phonology of the Slovene Language (= Historical Phonology of the Slavic Languages, vol. 13) (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2000); A Short Reference Grammar of Slovene (= LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 30) (Munich: Lincom, 2008); articles/chapters: “Slavic” in The Indo-European Languages (London: Routledge, 2017); “Introduction” to Bibliography of Slavic Linguistics (Leiden: Brill, 2015); “The Slavic Area: Trajectories, Borders, Centres, and Peripheries in the Second World” in Globalising Sociolinguistics: Challenging and Expanding Theory (London: Taylor & Francis, 2015). Editorial work: he was co-founder and co-editor (with Marko Snoj) of Slovenski jezik / Slovene Linguistic Studies (1997–2011) as well as Slavia Centralis (with Marko Jesenšek). In addition, Prof. Greenberg has published extensively and collaboratively on open-access issues with a focus on global equal-access to research for readers and researchers.

In addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics (Brill, est. date of publ. 2021), he serves on the editorial boards of the journals Lingua Montenegrina (Cetinje), Književni jezik (Sarajevo), Naučnaja periodika: problemi i rešenija (Moscow), Voprosy onomastiki (Moscow, Ekaterinburg), Croatica et slavica iadertina (Zadar), Russian Review (Lawrence, USA), and Proglas (Veliko Tărnovo). He is a member of the Commission for Language Contact of the International Congress of Slavists. He serves on national and international boards including Center for Urban Language Teaching and Research, Georgia State University (Atlanta); Gabriel Al-Salem Foundation (Florida, USA and Almaty, Kazakhstan).