James M. Lang, Ph.D. is the author of six books, the most recent of which are Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Jossey-Bass, 2016), and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard University Press, 2013). Lang writes a monthly column on teaching and learning for The Chronicle of Higher Education; his work has been appearing in the Chronicle since 1999. His book reviews and public scholarship on higher education have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The Conversation, Time, the Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune. He edits a series of books on teaching and learning in higher education for West Virginia University Press; he co-edited the second book in the series, Teaching the Literature Survey Course: New Strategies for College Faculty (2018). He has conducted workshops on teaching for faculty at more than a hundred colleges or universities in the US and abroad, and consulted for the United Nations on the development of teaching materials in ethics and integrity for college faculty. In September of 2016 he received a Fulbright Specialist grant to work with three universities in Colombia on the creation of a MOOC on teaching and learning in STEM education. In 2021 he stepped away from a full-time position as Professor of English and the Director of the D'Amour Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption University in order devote more time to writing. He has a BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, an MA in English from St. Louis University, and a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University. You can follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse or learn more at http://jamesmlang.com. This year, CNDLS facilitated a book club for faculty featuring Distracted. We look forward to hearing Lang discuss his research and strategies for “cultivating attention” in this keynote address.

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