Mark Richard Lauersdorf is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities (RCH) at the University of Kentucky. Pursuing his interests in Germanic and Slavic historical sociolinguistics he has spent extended periods in Germany (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz), Norway (Universitetet i Agder, Kristiansand), Poland (Uniwersytet Warszawski, Warsaw), and Slovakia (Univerzita Komenského, Jazykovedný ústav Ľudovíta Štúra SAV, and Slavistický ústav Jána Stanislava SAV, Bratislava), as well as regular stays in northern France.

A large portion of his work has investigated historical language contact, language variation, and standardization in West Slavic (particularly Slovak) with two books and a series of articles on the topic of Slovak language standardization in the pre-codification period. He is also interested in issues of historical contact between language families (Slavic-Germanic, Germanic-Romance) across political borders in Western and Central Europe, and the accompanying situations of "indigenous minority languages", language planning, and linguistic legislation.