About the Author

Andrew Carnie was born in Canada to Scottish parents. He was an active and engaged member of the expatriate Scottish community from the time he was a little boy. His mother used to take him and his sisters to weekly Scottish Country Dancing and he came to fall in love with his family’s traditions, learning to play the bagpipes and competing nationally as a Highland dancer. As a teenager he was introduced to International Folk Dancing at Calgary Folk Dance Fridays, and he continued folk dancing throughout college and grad school (with the IFDC club in Toronto and the MIT folk dance club in Cambridge, Mass). In Boston he also became involved with the gender-role free contra dance community. He performed in several performance groups including including Vinovana, Mandala and later TEDE in Tucson. Once he moved to Tucson he was one of the instructors of the Tucson Folk Dance Club and eventually founded his own club called the Shala Folk Dance Club, where he remains the benevolent dictator. In the early 2000s he ran a club for students at the university called the iDance club, which unfortunately folded after 9/11. But in 2020 with the encouragement of the then director of the School of Dance at the University of Arizona started a very popular general education class DNC179A, which was the original target audience for this book. One of Andrew’s favorite hobbies is the written documentation of  folkdances. Among folk dancers he’s well known for his website http://folkdancemusings.blogspot.com where he has written up the directions for over 3500 folk dances done in the international folk dance community. In 2023 he was honored for this documentary work with an honorary life membership in the National Folk Organization.

In his other life, Andrew is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. His expertise is in Chomskyan syntactic theory. He got his Ph.D. in linguistics from MIT in 1995. In recent years, his work has been on the Minimalist Principles and Parameters approach to syntactic theory including phrase structure, copular constructions, case theory, word order (especially verb initial languages). For the past 15 years, he has been leading an interdisciplinary team investigating the syntax, phonology and phonetics of Modern Scottish Gaelic. He is the author of numerous articles and 14 books. From 2012-2022, he was  the Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate College at the University of Arizona.