William Comer directs the innovative Russian Language Flagship Program in the Russian Section of the World Languages and Literatures Department at Portland State. He came to Portland State in 2014 after starting his career in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Kansas (1992-2014). His pedagogical edition of Viktoria Tokareva’s short story A Day without Lying (Slavica, 2008) was awarded the prize for Best Book in Language Pedagogy by American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages in 2010. He is co-author of Mezhdu nami (=Between you and me), an online, open-access textbook for elementary Russian. 

In 2015-16, he is co-director of the joint PSU-University of Oregon Flagship Community Linkages grant which seeks to strengthen the connections between language programs in schools and community colleges and The Language Flagship programs. 

He teaches courses in Russian language, literature and culture in both Russian and translations. At Kansas, he also coordinated the Russian language program, training and supervising graduate teaching assistants.   In August 2009 he won the University of Kansas W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. He has published articles in national journals including the Slavic and East European Journal, Russian Language Journal and Foreign Language Annals.