PAUL ANTHONY MEGO was born January 27, 1960 in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1967 his family moved to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia where his father had an opportunity to participate in a scientific research exchange with the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic for one year at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava. The family (including father, mother and older sister) lived in Czechoslovakia from August 1967 to June 1968, when the mother, sister, and Paul returned to the United States. His father stayed on until the academic year was completed that August.

The family then moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Paul’s father gained employment as a professor of Biochemistry at the University of Alabama. Paul attended public elementary and high schools in Tuscaloosa. Upon graduation from high school in 1978, Paul enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Alabama majoring in Anthropology. After two years at the University, an opportunity to open a small business presented itself and Paul withdrew before completing the undergraduate degree to form a business partnership in June 1981 selling and repairing bicycles in Tuscaloosa. The business partnership lasted about six years (the business is still active under full ownership of the former partner) and Paul sold his interest in order to complete his university education.

Paul completed his Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in Anthropology and Geography before enrolling in the University of Alabama Graduate School with the department of Political Science. Paul completed a Master of Arts degree in Political Science in 1994, and continued in the Doctoral program in the same department. Paul married his fiancé, Patricia Ann Tanski in 1993. In 1994, Paul was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct dissertation research on Slovak national identity and electoral politics in the Slovak Republic, and he and his wife moved to Bratislava, Slovakia for fourteen months. Upon his return to the United States to complete the Ph.D. program, Paul was employed as an adjunct instructor of Political Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham where he taught for more than three years while writing the Ph.D. dissertation.

Paul completed his dissertation-Nationalist Rhetoric and Political Competition in Slovakia: December 1989 to June 1992-in 1999 and was offered a full-time, tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lambuth University in Jackson, Tennessee. Jackson is a city of approximately 60,000 in West Central Tennessee. Paul and his wife, Patricia, now reside in Jackson, where he teaches and conducts research at Lambuth. Tenure review will take place in 2005. Lambuth University is a small, undergraduate, liberal arts university, loosely affiliated with the United Methodist Church. Lambuth has approximately 1000 full-time students and 49 full-time faculty members.

Back to Board