Karin Ryding

Karin Ryding is Professor Emerita of Arabic linguistics at Georgetown University. From 1995-98 she served as Dean of Interdisciplinary Programs at Georgetown, and from 1996-2002, was a member of the Georgetown University Board of Governors.  From 1980-86, she headed Arabic training at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. She is past president of the  American Association of Teachers of Arabic (AATA), on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA), a member of  the MLA’s Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) Executive Committee, and was on the MLA Ad-Hoc Committee for Foreign Languages from 2004-06. 

She was for many years on the board of directors for Georgetown University Press, the national advisory board of the National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC), on the Arabic language advisory board of AMIDEAST Education Abroad Programs. In 2008, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from AATA as well as the Distinguished Service Award from the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics of Georgetown University.

Principal publications include The Cambridge Handbook of Arabic Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Arabic: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Teaching and Learning Arabic as a Foreign Language (Georgetown University Press, 2013), A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Formal Spoken Arabic: Basic Course (Georgetown University Press,1990, second edition, 2005), Formal Spoken Arabic: FAST Course (Georgetown University Press, 1993, reprint, 2004), in addition to many published articles on Arabic linguistics, Arabic alchemical texts, and Arabic as a foreign language.