Andy Curtis

Dr. Andy Curtis (PhD) started his professional life working as a clinical biochemist in hospitals in the UK. However, having found his real passions – teaching, learning, languages and cultures – he moved from health care to science education to language education, making his a highly unusual and risky professional pathway. But such a pathway has enabled him to bring together diverse fields of inquiry that has not been previously connected, to create new bodies of knowledge and disciplinary domains. He has been recognized as the founder of the New Peace Linguistics, which focuses on how powerful people use language not communicate but to manipulate.

After completing his M.A. in Applied Linguistics and Language Education and his Ph.D. in International Education at the University of York in England, Dr. Curtis taught language and logistics courses at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University from 1995 to 2000. From 2001 to 2007, he was the Executive Director of the School of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, and a professor at the School for International Training in Vermont, USA.

From 2007 to 2011, Dr. Curtis served as the Director of the English Language Teaching Unit at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and as a professor in the Faculty of Education there. He has been an online TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) professor in the Graduate School of Education of Anaheim University, CA, USA since 2011. From 2015 to 2016, Andy served as the 50th President of the TESOL International Association. In 2016, he received one of the Association’s 50-at-50 Awards, when members around the world voted him one of the fifty most influential figures in the field, over the first 50 years of the Association.

Over the last 30-plus years, Dr. Curtis has (co)authored and (co)edited 200 articles, book chapters, and books, presented to 50,000 language educators in 100 countries, in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, North, South and Central America, and his writings have been read by 100,000 language educators in 150 countries. Dr. Curtis is currently serving as a Distinguished Guest Professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the City University of Macau, and is cross-appointed to a number of universities in Mainland China. His recent books include, Reflecting on Leadership in Language Education (2022), The New Peace Linguistics and The Role of Language in Conflict (2022), and Bad Language: Decoding Donald Trump (2024).