Mr. Louis Petrich received his master’s degree in social thought from the University of Chicago in 1986. He worked as a dramaturg, assistant director, and actor at the Court Theater in Chicago and at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. In 1990, he received his first Fulbright Scholar Award to teach American literature at the Alexandru I. Cuza University in Iasi, Romania, where the worst communist regimes in Eastern Europe had just been violently overthrown. This experience caused him to spend the next decade in similar activities. In 1992, he joined the United States Peace Corps in Czechoslovakia to teach the future teachers of that country. He spent the next decade teaching American studies through the Civic Education Project to university students in Slovakia, Romania, and Kyrgyzstan. In 2001 He received a second Fulbright Scholar Award to teach American studies at Kyrgyz State National University in Bishkek, where he founded the American Studies Resources and Training Center. He returned to the United States in 2002 to begin a very different academic career as a Tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He remains there to this day, teaching the great books across the liberal arts curriculum, while recently co-hosting the College’s video and podcast series called “Continuing the Conversation.” He took a leave of absence in 2010 to spend a year helping to found and teach the core program of liberal arts at the American University of Sulaimani in Iraq. He has two children, ages 25 and 18, and in his spare time he writes poetry and photographs marine life on the oceanic reefs of the world.