Prof. John Peter Maher

Prof. John Peter Maher
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John Peter Maher Curriculum Vitae

John Peter Maher was born of Irish parents in New York State in 1933.In 1955 he earned his B. A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton and took an M. A. in Greek and Latin at The Catholic University of America in Washington D. C. After studying the Serbo-Croatian language at U. S. Army Language School in Monterey, California, he served on the Yugoslav desk of the 430th Military Intelligence Battalion in northern Italy from1959 to 1961, at the height of the Cold War.After his army hitch he took a doctorate in historical linguistics at Indiana University, minoring in Latin and Slavic.He had been a language teacher in New York State high schools for three years, when in 1964 he began in university teaching in Chicago.In 1974 he was awarded a tenured chair of English linguistics in the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he directed the Third International Conference on Historical Linguistics (1977).The same year he returned to Chicago.In 1993 he was appointed professor emeritus.Since then he has concentrated his research and writing on the subject of propaganda in the current Balkan wars.

His research specialty is the interface of language and culture in modern languages and reconstructing culture from language evidence of ancient, medieval and prehistoric European languages on the basis of Greek, Celtic, Latin, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic vocabulary.

He is one of the few original etymologists working today.He has published critical works in theoretical linguistics and has served on the editorial boards of several journals.He has held Fulbright lecturing and research grants in Ireland, Italy, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.In 1997 he was an invited lecturer on H0ungarian language and culture at the Budapest meeting of Young Presidents Organization.