James S. Levine received his B.A. in History and Russian from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Levine also studied Russian language, literature, and culture at Moscow University and St. Petersburg University, Russia. He has taught Russian for the past twenty-five years at several universities, including the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland at College Park, and George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is currently Associate Professor of Russian at George Mason University, where he is also Director of Russian Studies. He has served as a consultant on foreign language education projects for the American Council on Education, and as a specialist reviewer and panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Security Education Program, and the American Council of Teachers of Russian. He is co-translator of The Black Book, coeditor of Case in Slavic, and author of numerous articles on Russian language and linguistics.