Will Travers

Dr. Will Travers is a former monolingual with a wide array of experiences in various foreign languages.  After learning French the hard way (through countless hours over the course of an entire decade, finally culminating in a year abroad in Paris), he began learning Spanish and within less than a year had reached a conversational level in his second foreign language.  The question of how he was able to learn Spanish in a fraction of the time it took him to learn French led him to pursue a PhD in Spanish Linguistics at Georgetown University, where in 2024 he completed his dissertation on instructed third-language (L3) acquisition and its facilitating factors, with a special emphasis on metalinguistic awareness.

Before joining the faculty at UAlbany, Dr. Travers spent two years at Davidson College teaching classes in Spanish, linguistics, and French.  Prior to that, he taught Spanish and linguistics at Emory University following a year in Darmstadt, Germany, where he completed a Fulbright fellowship.  At Georgetown, he was committed to promoting the many L3 classes there, such as French for Spanish Speakers, which he created in 2016 and subsequently taught for four semesters.  He has published academic articles in the journal Hispania, as well as a chapter in an edited volume by the UK-based Multilingual Matters, and enjoys sharing his work at conferences such as AAAL (Denver, 2025), SLRF (Montréal, 2018), ISB (Limerick, 2017), and ACTFL (Boston, 2016; San Diego, 2015).

Dr. Travers also still loves learning languages and makes sure to regularly practice those he’s invested time in, including Portuguese, Italian, German, Hindi, Urdu, and most recently (and least proficiently), Danish.