Karin C. Ryding

Karin Christina Ryding

Karin Christina Ryding is professor emerita of Arabic linguistics in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. She holds a B.A. from Middlebury College, M.A. from The American University of Beirut, and Ph.D. from Georgetown University. From 1980-86, she was head of Arabic training at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. From 1995-98 she served as Dean of Interdisciplinary Programs at Georgetown University. From 1996-2002, she was a member of the Georgetown University Board of Governors.

From 1991-1995, 1998-2000 and from 2002-2004, she was chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown, and from 1995-2008, she held the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professorship of Arabic. Principal publications include 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 and Arabic as a foreign language.

Ryding is a past president (2007-2008) of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic (AATA), as well as a three-term member of the AATA Executive Committee. From 2005-07, she was principal investigator and project adviser to the Arabic Language Flagship Project at Georgetown, a full-year intensive Arabic program to bring students from the intermediate to advanced or superior level of proficiency. Ryding currently sits on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association (MLA), was a member of the MLA's Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL) Executive Committee from 1995-98, and was on the MLA Ad-Hoc Committee for Foreign Languages from 2004-06. She currently sits on the board of directors for Georgetown University Press, the national advisory board of the National Middle East Language Resource Center (NMELRC, and the committee on membership services and information technology of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).