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.

Vera Felder is the Program Manager of the Shared Course Initiative, an inter-institutional collaboration between Columbia, Cornell, and Yale Universities for supporting and sustaining less commonly taught languages.

Before joining Columbia’s Language Resource Center, she earned her doctorate degree from the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley and her M.A. and B.A. in Linguistics from San Francisco State University. Her area of interest is cognitive linguistics with an emphasis on second language acquisition and teaching methodologies.