Victor A. Friedman is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is president of the U.S. National Committee of the International Association for Southeast European Studies. He is a member of the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of Sciences of Albania, the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Kosova, Matica Srpska, and has been awarded the "1300 Years of Bulgaria" jubilee medal. He has thrice been awarded the Golden Plaque from Sts. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, from which he also holds the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa. He received the Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship Award from American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2009 and the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Scholarship of the Association for East European Eurasian and Slavic Studies in 2014. His research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, etc. During the Yugoslav Wars of Succession he worked for the United Nations as a senior policy analyst in Macedonia and consulted for other international organizations. His publications include more than a dozen books and edited works, as well as more than 300 scholarly articles and book reviews. In addition to his research on the Balkan languages, he has published extensively on Lak and Georgian. He has done field work in Daghestan in addition to more than 40 years of field work in the Balkans. His main research interests are grammatical categories, contact linguistics, and sociolinguistic issues related to standardization, ideology, and identity. His current projects include The Balkan Languages (Cambridge U.P., with Brian Joseph), The Slavonic Languages 2nd. edition (edited with Lenore Grenoble, Routledge), Lak (The Oxford Handbook of Languages of the Caucasus, ed. by Masha Polinsky), Overiview; and The Balkans for Sprachbund and Linguistic Areas (The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact ed. by Salikoko Mufwene and Anna María Escobar), and The Impact of Turkish on Romani (Handbook of Romani Linguistics, ed. by Yaron Matras and Anton Tenser, Palgrave Macmillan).