Dr. Ernest Lunsford

A North Carolina native, Dr. Ernest Lunsford fell in love with foreign languages in high school where he studied Latin,Spanish and French. As an undergraduate, he added courses in Italian and Portuguese, but decided to major in his first love — Spanish. He spent a year studying abroad in Lima, Peru, an experience that changed his life. It opened up a whole new world and he discovered other ways of viewing and appreciating different peoples and cultures, not to mention fresh perspectives on his own. In graduate school, he spent another year studying in Madrid, Spain. These enriching experiences made him an avid advocate of study-abroad and, as a professor, he led study-abroad programs to Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Spain and he studied Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro. Following his retirement from Elon, he has returned to being a study-abroad language student himself, studying Italian in Florence and French in Aix-en-Provence. He is delighted that Elon students will have the opportunity to study their chosen language and culture abroad with help from this grant.