Dr. R. Kirk Belnap is an associate professor of Arabic in BYU’s Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and is director of the National Middle East Language Resource Center, which coordinates efforts for increasing/improving opportunities for learning the languages of the Middle East.
Professor Belnap earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from BYU and completed his PhD in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been teaching at BYU since 1988. His research interests include the teaching of Arabic as a second language, computer-assisted language learning, sociolinguistics, language attitudes and literacy, and the history of Arabic. He previously served as executive director of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, then editor of its journal, and serves now as president of the association. He has a particular interest in developing and studying effective intensive study abroad programs and has personally directed programs based in Jerusalem, Damascus, Tangier, and Amman. Since 2007 he has directed BYU’s annual summer intensive Arabic camps for high school students and oversees BYU Independent Study’s Arabic without Walls.
Brother Belnap was a faculty member at the BYU Jerusalem Center in 1989 and in 1996–97. Because of political unrest in the Holy Land, he took the 2001 Winter/Spring Intensive Arabic Program students to study in Syria, with significant study time spent in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Spain. He is married to Linnea Pearson.
Source: fairlatterdaysaints.org (2011)