Speaker Biographies

Terry Baker, Associate Professor of Accountancy,
Wake Forest University
Terry Baker has led a summer study abroad program to Europe since 2008 and teaches an undergraduate course in partnership with the Bordeaux School of Business that examines business management problems in the wine industry. He also teaches graduate courses on international accounting that focus on the current effort to find a uniform global accounting language. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Miami University, master’s degrees from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago and a doctorate in accountancy from the University of Kentucky.

Darla Deardorff, Executive Director, Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA), Duke University
Darla Deardorff has worked in international education for more than 15 years and teaches graduate courses in international education and intercultural communication. She has experience in study abroad, international student services, cultural programming and ESL teaching/teacher training. She has also published widely on international education and is editor of The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence. She is frequently invited to consult and lecture around the world on intercultural competence and assessment. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Bridgewater College and a master’s and doctorate from North Carolina State University where she focused on international education.

Steven Duke, Director, Center for International Studies,
Wake Forest University
Steven Duke oversees Wake Forest’s study abroad office and coordinates the university’s intercultural competency program for students. He serves on Wake Forest’s Overseas Crisis Management Team and is a point-person on risk/crisis management issues for faculty leading study abroad programs. A specialist on modern Russia and the Baltic region, he has taught history classes at Brigham Young University and coordinated international programs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest. His article “Multi-ethnic St. Petersburg: The Tsarist Period” was recently published in Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia. He has a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and two master’s degrees and a doctorate in history from Indiana University.

Steven Folmar, Assistant Professor, Anthropology,
Wake Forest University
Steven Folmar began conducting anthropological research in Nepal in 1979. In 2001, he led his first study abroad trip to Nepal. Since then, he has led six study abroad groups to Nepal, where his students have home-stay accommodations, study Nepali and conduct independent projects related to tourism, health, development and the social conditions of marginalized people. He is a prolific writer, and his most recent article is Identity Politics among Dalits in Nepal. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in anthropology from Case Western University.

Mary Gerardy, Associate Vice President and Dean of Campus Life, Wake Forest University
Mary Gerardy oversees a wide range of programs for students, including Wake Forest’s Volunteer Service Corps (VSC), which coordinates service trips organized by students. Over the past 15 years, she has been instrumental in helping more than 530 students, faculty and staff participate in VSC-sponsored trips to Belize, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Honduras, India, Russia, South Africa and Vietnam. Since 2001, she has personally led service trips and study abroad programs to Vietnam, and in 1998, she led a service trip to India. She is a certified trainer in numerous areas, and throughout her career, she has developed, led and facilitated several training and leadership programs for both students and faculty. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Hiram College, master’s degrees from Kent State University and Wake Forest University and holds both a master’s and doctorate in human and organizational systems from The Fielding Graduate University.

Kline Harrison, Associate Provost for Global Affairs, Kemper Professor of Business, Wake Forest University
Kline Harrison leads the international affairs efforts for Wake Forest University. His responsibilities include pursuing international initiatives for student learning (both academic and experiential), for faculty instruction and development, and for interdisciplinary and cross-campus collaborations. In addition, he has taught courses in global trade and commerce and organizational theory and behavior. His research has focused on various aspects of international organizational and human resource management with an emphasis on the impact of personality variables on students’ study abroad experiences. For 12 years he led an international business study tour in Western Europe during which students learned about the distinctive characteristics of global business operations through multiple site visits and presentations. He chairs Wake Forest’s Global Advisory Council and served as conference chair for the annual meeting of the Forum on Education Abroad in 2010. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and his doctorate in organizational behavior from the University of Maryland.

Mike Lord, Director of the China Program and Sisel Fellow in Strategy, Wake Forest University
Mike Lord manages the international programs (China, India, Europe, Japan and Latin America) of the Flow Institute at Wake Forest’s Business Schools. His responsibilities also include helping manage international relationships such as faculty and student exchanges with various global partner institutions. As director of the China Program, he has organized and led overseas management programs for many years on conducting business in and with Greater China. His research and consulting focus on international expansion and global learning and innovation. He has a bachelor’s degree with honors from Harvard University, a master of business administration from Baylor University and a doctorate in strategic management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

John Lucas, Associate Vice-President and Deputy Director of Academic Programs, IES Abroad
John Lucas is responsible for the academic oversight of IES Abroad programs, including supervision of the IES Program Deans. He also maintains direct responsibility for IES Abroad's programs in Barcelona, Berlin, and Vienna. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish linguistics from Penn State University and a Master's degree in International and Intercultural Management from the School for International Training. Dr. Lucas directed international programs in Spain and has taught Spanish language, Catalan, Spanish translation, and linguistics. His research interests include second language acquisition, cross-cultural counseling, intercultural communication, and medieval studies. An active member of ACTFL, the Early Book Society, and the North American Catalan Society, Dr. Lucas remains current on the scholarship in his academic fields of specialization and continues to publish and lecture on these topics. Currently, Dr. Lucas is developing a new IES Abroad Map for Language and Intercultural Training to harmonize language teaching across the thirty-four IES Abroad Centers and the ten languages IES Abroad currently teaches..

Ananda Mitra, Professor and Chair of Communication, Wake Forest University
Ananda Mitra designed and directed Wake Forest's newest summer study abroad program in India, which began this year. He teaches courses on communication and electronic media and specializes in survey research. He has also taught and conducted research on various communication and cultural issues in India. His recent publications have focused on the impact of new technologies on global communication and culture. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, India, a master's degree from Wake Forest, and a Ph.D. in speech communication from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Penelope Pynes, Associate Provost, International Programs, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Penelope Pynes leads the internationalization efforts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG). In 2005, she represented the UNC system in an administrative exchange at the Ministry of Science and Arts in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Since then, she has worked to promote student/faculty exchange and piloted the Baden-Wuerttemberg state-to-state program, which led to the establishment of UNC’s system-wide exchange program. She facilitates diversity and intercultural workshops on and off campus to prepare faculty and students for successful experiences abroad. She is a former Fulbright scholar to Heidelberg, Germany, and was awarded a Rotary Club Study Exchange Scholarship to Norway. She earned her master’s degree from the University of Alabama and a doctorate in Germanic linguistics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Rebecca Thomas, Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of German, Wake Forest University
Rebecca Thomas has served twice as resident director of the Wake Forest Flow House in Vienna. She teaches German language, literature, and culture at all levels, and specializes in modern Austrian studies. Since 1988 she has been teaching German at a six-week summer course for musicians in Graz, Austria. She is currently collaborating with other foreign language faculty on campus to implement a comprehensive Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum program at Wake Forest.

Mick Vande Berg, Vice President for Academic Affairs, Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE)
Mick Vande Berg has been involved with study abroad and international programs for more than 25 years. He is on the faculty of the Summer Insitute for Intercultural Communication in Portland, Oregon, and coordinates intercultural training for CIEE faculty. He recently published articles in Intercultural Education, The SAGE Handbook of Intercultural Competence, and Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. Prior to joining CIEE, he served as Director of International Programs at Georgetown University, Dean of Study Abroad at the School for International Training, Director of Study Abroad at Michigan State University and Director of the Center for International Programs at Kalamazoo College.  He also served for several years as Director of English-Language Programs at the Instituto International in Madrid.  He received his bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the latter in Comparative Literature.

Tim Wallace, Associate Professor of Anthropology, North Carolina State University
Tim Wallace has been leading ethnographic field schools every summer since 1994. His research includes work in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, Japan, Hungary, Madagascar, Mozambique and Togo. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology and an M.A. in Latin American Studies at Indiana University. He is a Fellow and an Executive Board member of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association, a member of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) where until 2007 he has been general series co-editor of the NAPA Bulletin series. He recently became the President-Elect of NAPA. Currently he is the Editor of the Society for Applied Anthropology Newsletter.

Byron Wells, Professor of French and Chair of Romance Languages, Wake Forest University
Byron Wells has participated in study abroad programs at Wake Forest for more than 20 years. He has taught semester-long programs in France, Italy and Japan. He helped establish Wake Forest’s summer program in Morocco, and led that program in its initial year. He actively encourages French, Italian and Spanish professors to participate in study abroad programs. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Georgia, another master’s and a doctorate in French/Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He currently serves as the executive director of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which has its executive office at Wake Forest. He is an administrative officer for the American Council of Learned Societies, serves on the executive board for the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and sits on the editorial board of Eighteenth-Century Studies.

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