About the Author:

Stanley D. Brunn Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. His childhood years were spent living in different states; before he graduated from high school, he lived in six Midwestern states, perhaps explaining why he is passionate about geography, landscapes, places, languages, faith communities, and human and environmental diversity. He has more than 5 years of university teaching and research experience in the United States and 20 other countries around the world. His US experiences have been at the University of Florida, Michigan State University, and the University of Kentucky, where he has been since 1980. He has taught in major universities in northern, southern, and eastern Europe (15 different) as well as in Central Asia, China, Australia, and South Africa. His research interests cover a broad array of topics within urban, economic, social, information/communications, geotechnology and cyberspace, time-space intersections, law, political, and environmental geography, geographical future, as well as disciplinary history. He has traveled in more than 100 countries and made over 200 presentations at conferences in the United States and internationally. He has authored, edited, or co-edited more than 20 books and published more than 100 articles in major national and regional journals and written nearly that many chapters, many with colleagues in other countries. Some have yet to see the light of day. The research scale of his studies includes local and regional arenas as well as global scales. In recent years he has become interested in the geographies of silences and abandonment, disciplinary intersections and interdisciplinary studies, global language and religion issues, cyberspace and regional development, and social, racial, and political injustices. His geographical interests continually expand to develop deeper appreciations of art, music, drama, and poetry. His eclectic interests are always searching for topics that have not been studied that need to be studied. He has received numerous awards and honors in his lifetime for his disciplinary service and scholarly record. He also is a lifelong stamp collector which recently has emerged as one of his retirement research foci. Also, he has written a weekly poem for the past 3 1/2 years which he sends to friends around the world; all have a focus on social, political, and environmental justice about issues he feels compassionate about locally, nationally, and globally. His global network of friends extends to those with intersecting interests to empower community, national, and international inter-faith and environmental groups. Geography, in his mind, is to be lived, experienced, and shared with those hoping to make the world a more peaceful, just, and safe place to live, work, experience, and empower fulfillment. His living motto is "to whom much is given, much is expected."

Roland Kehrein is a Professor at the Research Center Deutscher Sprachatlas at the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany. As a scholar of German Linguistics specializing in variation and change of regional languages, he is the author and co-editor of several books in this field and related areas. Among these are two international handbooks: Regionale Variation des Deutschen. Projekte und Perspektiven (2015) and Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation. Vol. 2: Language Mapping (2010) (two volumes) published in the well-known series Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science. In addition to his books, he has written numerous articles in the field and he is continuously presenting his research at relevant international conferences. Since 2016 he is chief editor of the academic journal/book series Germanistische Linguistik. He is regularly involved in review processes for conference contributions, articles, and research proposals and supervises student projects at B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. levels. Roland Kehrein is also a well-known forensic consultant specialized in dialectal analysis and carrying out casework for prosecution and defense.