Lynn Williams, recently appointed associate chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the College of Humanities, will deliver a Brigham Young University devotional address titled, “Will Heaven Feel like Home When We Get There?” Tuesday, May 31, at 11:05 a.m. in the de Jong Concert Hall.
The devotional will be broadcast live on the BYU Broadcasting channels and online at byub.org. Rebroadcast and archive information will be available at byub.org/devotionals or speeches.byu.edu.
Williams has been a professor of Hispanic linguistics and Spanish at BYU since 2000. He previously acted as an external examiner in Spanish for the University of Oxford from 1997 to 1999, and in 1998 he spent two semesters at the University of Cambridge as a visiting professor. He also taught part-time in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Cardiff while finishing his doctoral studies.
In 1978, Williams had a permanent position as a lecturer in Spanish at the University of Exeter, where he taught Spanish language, Spanish linguistics, medieval Spanish literature and various aspects of Spanish history and culture. He served as deputy chair of the School of Modern Languages, as associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and as chair of the Department of Spanish at University of Exeter. He supervised a number of Exeter graduate students in subjects as diverse as Spanish sociolinguistics, the minority languages of Spain and the kharjas.
Williams has written and published on medieval Spanish literature, Cervantes, Spanish sociolinguistics, orthographic theory and practice, language and national identity in Spain and the United Kingdom, and 17th-century Spanish diplomatic history.
As a native of rural South Wales, Williams studied at the University of London, where he majored in Spanish, minored in Portuguese and completed a doctorate in Spanish sociolinguistics.
For more information, contact Lynn Williams at (801) 422-3273 or email lynn_williams@byu.edu.
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Writer: Mel Gardner