Anet a Pavlenko grew up in Kiev, Ukraine, and left the USSR just before it collapsed (a coincidence, not a consequence). After a short stay in a refugee settlement in Italy, she came to the United States
and, for reasons she is still trying to comprehend, decided to get a doctorate. While in graduate school, she supported herself and her son by working as an interpreter and case worker for the Refugee
Assistance Program in Ithaca, New York. She received her Ph.D. in General Linguistics at Cornell
University in 1997. Between 1998 and 2016 she was a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Temple
University, Philadelphia and in 2014-2015 she served as President of the American Association for
Applied Linguistics. From 2017 she has been a Research Professor at the Center for Multilingualism
at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her research focuses on the relationship between multilingualism,
cognition, and emotions; forensic linguistics; and language management in imperial Russia, the USSR
and post-Soviet states. She has authored more than a hundred articles and ten books, has lectured
widely in North America, Europe and Asia and is the winner of the 2006 BAAL Book of the Year
award, the 2009 TESOL Award for Distinguished Research and the 2021 AAAL Research Article award.