Istvan Kecskes is a Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York at Albany. He is the President of the American Pragmatics Association and the Chinese as a Second Language Research Association. Notable publications include Intercultural Pragmatics (Oxford University Press, 2014) and English as a Lingua Franca: The pragmatic perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is the founding editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics, the Mouton Series in Pragmatics, and the bilingual journal Chinese as a Second Language Research.