Short answers, pulled from the story.
Peter Trudgill was born on the 7th of November 1943 in Norwich, England, and grew up in Thorpe St Andrew. He studied modern languages at King's College, Cambridge, and obtained a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1971.
Trudgill taught at the University of Reading from 1970 to 1986, then held professorships at the University of Essex, the University of Lausanne from 1993 to 1998, and the University of Fribourg, from which he retired in September 2005. He is now professor emeritus of English Linguistics at Fribourg and an honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of East Anglia.
Trudgill is one of the first scholars to apply Labovian sociolinguistic methodology in the UK, treating regional dialects as serious objects of study. He also developed a framework for studying dialect contact phenomena, examining what happens when speakers of different varieties come into sustained contact.
Trudgill tracked trends in British rock music for decades and found that the Beatles' pronunciation of r sounds decreased over the course of the 1960s. This suggests the group gradually shifted away from American-influenced phonetic features toward their native speech patterns.
Trudgill received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University on the 2nd of June 1995, along with honorary doctorates from institutions in the UK, Australia, Greece, Spain, Poland, and Canada. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
At the end of 2017, Trudgill signed the Declaration on the Common Language of the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins. The declaration affirms that the speech varieties politically classified as four separate national languages are better understood as varieties of a single shared language.