E-mail: vfriedm@uchicago.edu
I was born in Chicago in 1949 and received my B.A. in Russian Language and Literature from Reed College in 1970 and my Ph. D. in both Slavic Languages and Literatures and in General Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1975. This was the first joint degree granted in the Division of the Humanities at Chicago, and my dissertation won the Mark Perry Galler prize for the Division that year. From 1975 to 1993 I taught in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I chaired the Department from 1987-93. In 1993 I moved to the University of Chicago, where I hold a joint appointment in Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures (which I chaired 1997-2004), with an associate appointment in Anthropology. I am currently Director of the Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at Chicago. I have over 200 publications, and my book, Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative (Slavica, 1977) was the first book on Modern Macedonian published in the United States.
I have done fieldwork in the Balkans for over thirty years and have received research grants from Fulbright-Hays, IREX, ACLS, NEH, and APS. In 1982 I received the "1300 Years of Bulgaria" jubilee medal for contributions to the field of Bulgarian studies, in 1991 and again in 2003 I was awarded the University of Skopje Gold Plaque Award for contributions to the field of Macedonian studies. In 1994 I was elected to the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1995 to Matica Srpska, and in 2004 to the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosova. During the summer of 1994 I worked as a Senior Policy and Political Analyst for the Analysis and Assessment Unit of the United Nations Protection Forces stationed in former Yugoslavia. In 1995 I joined a fact finding mission for the South Balkan Project of the Center for Preventive Action of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1997 I taught Balkan Linguistics at the LSA Summer Institute and in 1998 I conducted linguistic fieldwork in Daghestan. In 1999 I lectured at various universities in Japan under the auspices of the Japan Foundation for the Promotion of Science. In 2000 I was a visiting scholar at the National University of Malaysia, and in 1999, 2001, and 2003 I lectured on Romani linguistics at Central European University, Budapest.My research centers on grammatical categories (particularly the verb), language contact, and sociolinguistics (especially problems of variation and standardization) in the Balkans and the Caucasus. Due to the intimate connections of language with politics and ethnic identity in these parts of the world my work has of necessity been interdisciplinary. My publications deal with the following languages (the asterisk indicates primary research interest): Albanian*, Azeri, Bulgarian*, Georgian, Greek, Lak*, Macedonian*, Romani*, Romanian, Russian, the former Serbo-Croatian, Tadjik, Turkish, Vlah (Arumanian & Megleno-Romanian)*. For my CV and publications that can be downloaded as pdf files, click here.
Work in progress: Outlines of the grammatical structures of Macedonian, Albanian, and Lak; The Balkan Languages (Cambridge Green Series, with Brian Joseph), various papers and articles on my research interests.
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