Dennis R. Preston is Regents Professor, Oklahoma State University and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Hawaii, Arizona, Michigan, Copenhagen, and Berkeley and a Fulbright Researcher in Poland and Brazil. He was Director of the 2003 Linguistic Society of America Institute, President of the American Dialect Society, and has served on the Executive Boards of those societies and others, as well as the editorial boards of numerous journals and panels of granting agencies. He is a member of the advisory committees to several international research projects and is invited frequently for presentations in both academic and popular venues. His work focuses on sociolinguistics and dialectology, including four recent NSF grants, two in folk linguistics and two in language variation and change. His most recent book-length publications are, with Nancy Niedzielski, Folk linguistics (2000), with Daniel Long, A handbook of perceptual dialectology, Volume II (2002),Needed research in American dialects (2003), with Brian Joseph and Carol G. Preston, Linguistic diversity in Michigan and Ohio (2005), with James Stanford, Variation in indigenous languages (2009), and, with Nancy Niedzielski, A reader in sociophonetics (2010). He is a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004.