After studying Statistics and Econometrics at the U. of Athens, Greece, Stéphane Charitos earned a B.Sc. in Data Processing and Quantitative Analysis from the U. of Arkansas. He took his M.A in French and Philosophy from the same university in 1983 before completing a Ph.D. in French and Spanish from the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992.

Stéphane taught French and Modern Greek at a number of universities including UNC-Wilmington, NC Trinity College, CT and Hollins College, VA before becoming Assistant Professor of French at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia in 1991. At ODU, he taught throughout the French language, literature, and culture curriculum as well as helping design, implement and deliver distance learning courses in conjunction with the school’s Darden Department of Education.

In 1996, Stéphane moved to the U. of Memphis, TN and was hired a year later by Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL to design and direct the university’s Foreign Language Media Center. In 1998, Columbia University hired him to design and direct the Language Resource Center, a Mellon funded initiative which oversees language instruction in less commonly taught languages and provides training and assistance to language faculty integrating media-rich applications into the second-language teaching curriculum.

Stéphane has given papers and published in areas as diverse as 16th and 20th-century French and Francophone literature, Cultural and Film Studies, Modern Greek Studies, Critical Theory as well as on issues related to technology and language instruction.

Christopher Kaiser is the Program Manager of the Shared Course Initiative, which connects less commonly taught language classrooms at Columbia, Cornell, and Yale using high-definition videoconferencing. His areas of interest include second language pedagogy, distance learning, presence in the distance environment, inter-institutional collaboration, and language-learning advocacy. He received his B.A. in Italian and Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh, his M.A. in Italian Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and his Ph.D. in Italian Literature from Yale University.