Nicholas Ostler is author of three books on language history, Empires of the Word (2005), Ad Infinitum (on Latin - 2007), and The Last Lingua Franca (2010). He is also Chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, a global charitable organization registered in England and Wales. A research associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, he has also been a visiting professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo, and L.N. Gumilev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. He holds an M.A. from Oxford University in Latin, Greek, philosophy and economics, and a 1979 Ph.D. in linguistics from M.I.T. He is an academician in the Russian Academy of Linguistics.