About the Author

Andrew Carnie was born in Canada to Scottish parents. He was an active and engaged member of the expatriate Scottish community when he was a little boy. His mother used to take him and his sisters to weekly Scottish country dancing, and he fell 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, Massachusetts). In Boston, he also became involved with the gender-role-free contra dance community. He performed with several groups, including Vinovana, Mandala, and later TEDE and Kalinka in Tucson. Once he moved to Tucson, he was an instructor at the Tucson Folk Dance Club and eventually founded his own club, the Shala Folk Dance Club, where he remains the benevolent dictator. In the early 2000s, he ran a student club 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, he started a very popular general education class, DNC179A, which became the original target audience for this book. One of Andrew’s favorite hobbies is documenting folk dances. Among folk dancers, he’s well known for his website http://folkdancemusings.blogspot.com, where he has written directions for over 3,500 folk dances performed within the international folk dance community. In 2023, he was honored with an honorary life membership in the National Folk Organization for this documentary work.

In his professional life, Andrew is a professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. His expertise is in Chomskyan syntactic theory. He earned 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, and 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.