Dr. Jill Beckman is the Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (DWLLC), Interim DEO of the Department of German, and Associate Professor of Linguistics.

Amber Brian is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. Her research and teaching focus on colonial Spanish America. Her publications address the movement of cultural knowledge and historical memory among native individuals and communities as well as between those communities and the dominant political sphere in colonial Mexico. She has published widely on don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578-1650), a mestizo historian connected with the Indian city of Tetzcoco who is a seminal figure in the development of Mexican history.

Andy has an M.A. in Linguistics with a focus on teaching English as a second language from the University of Iowa. His professional interests include language instruction, the promotion of inclusive learning environments, and instructional technology and design. He has studied Russian, French, Italian, and German in the classroom and enjoys working with faculty and students in the division to aid, promote, and enhance the learning of languages.

Dr. Ari Ariel's research focuses on Jewish communities in the Arab world and Mizrahi communities in Israel. His interests include ethnic, national, and religious identities, migration, and foodways. He regularly teaches World Events Today and Designing an International Studies Project, as well as courses on the Middle East, Jewish History and Food Studies.

Aron Aji, Director of MFA in Literary Translation, has joined the faculty in 2014. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, LatifeTekin, and other Turkish writers, including Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, and A Long Day’s Evening. His forthcoming translations include Ferid Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales, and Mungan’s Tales of Valor (co-translated with David Gramling). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019.  He leads the Translation Workshop, and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation; theory, and contemporary Turkish literature.

Brian Gollnick works on modern Mexican and Latin American cultural history from a perspective broadly influenced by the thinking of Antonio Gramsci. He is particularly concerned with the interactions between cultures and with how cultural expression relates to social justice. These interests also influence his teaching, which aims to expose students to historical perspectives through objects of study including music, film, art, and literary texts. The study of literature forms part of a Liberal Arts education aimed at helping students find new interests and encouraging the skills and passions necessary for a life of sustained learning and development.

Chuanren Ke (柯传仁) is Professor in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Second Language Acquisition PhD Program (aka FLARE, Foreign Language Acquisition Research and Education) in the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Iowa. His main area of research is in Chinese second language acquisition, instruction, and assessment. 

Claire holds a Master's degree in French Literature. She taught writing and French for many years before becoming the Director of the CLCL in 2019. Her interests include learning space design, instructional technologies, and peer education. She is working on developing opportunities for teaching and learning language and culture through cooking as well as incorporating the Global Seal of Biliteracy to help students earn a credential for their language learning. She's the current President of the Midwest Association of Language Learning and Technology (MWALLT).

Emilie Maurel-Destruel's primary research explores the semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of sentence structure variation and how the principles that govern this variation are manifested in French, but also across languages. She has worked on a range of topics in the field of pragmatics and the syntax/semantics interface, including the semantics and pragmatics of focus, the prosodic realization of focus in French and its acquisition by native french children, and existential constructions and the definiteness effect. She worked collaboratively on focus in ASL and in English.

Jack "Jacky" Doden has a Masters in Linguistics with a focus on teaching English as a second language from the University of Iowa. They strive to support students both inside and outside of their classes by bringing new technologies to the classroom, tutoring Korean for the CLCL's language tutoring program, and supervising student technology assistants.

Luke has an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Iowa. Through his work as a researcher and instructor, Luke has gained valuable experience in designing and conducting experiments, analyzing data, presenting findings, and using empirically tested methods to guide language instruction in the classroom. He speaks English, Spanish, and French, and loves to find new ways of taking the language learning experience out of the classroom and into daily life.

Meredith Mahy Gall is the senior academic advisor for the Division of World Literatures, Languages, and Cultures (including all world languages, International Studies, linguistics, and translation) and global health studies students.

Newell Ann Van Auken teaches Classical Chinese literature, a world literary tradition spanning over thirty centuries. Her research focuses on early China, and she is also a translator.

Rebecca is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the ASL Program at the University of Iowa. She earned her MA in Deaf Cultural Studies from Gallaudet University in 2011. This experience included courses in Aal, Norway and an internship with the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD). Prior to that she studied business at the University of Iowa, graduating with a BBA in Marketing and a minor in American Sign Language. Her interests in advertising and Deaf Studies inspired her to research the varied representations of deaf individuals and signed languages in the media.

Roxanna Curto is an Associate Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa. She received her Ph.D. in French from Yale in 2008 and her A.B. in Romance Studies from Harvard in 2001. In her research, she explores the representation of cultural elements such as technology and sports in literature from the French- and Spanish-speaking worlds. She is the author of Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2016). She has also published essays exploring connections between Aimé Césaire and Latin American literature, and the role of technology in the work of 20th-Century poets, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, and Denis Roche. Her second book project, Writing Sport: The Stylistics and Politics of Athletic Movement in French and Francophone Literature considers aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe, Africa, North America and the Caribbean. She recently co-edited the volume, Pour le sport: Physical Culture in French and Francophone Literature forthcoming with Liverpool University Press. 

Sarah Fagan’s research and teaching interests include Germanic linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and the German language.

Professor Nishi's primary research areas have been verb semantics and the second language acquisition of aspect. She is particularly interested in discovering how learners’ semantic representations of verbs in L1 affect the learning of verb semantics in L2, and how this interacts with the acquisition of aspectual morphology in L2. In most of her projects, she pursues a cross-linguistic approach in order to explore how underlying universal patterns are manifested in the process of language acquisition/development, or in the representation of languages, as well as to identify cross-linguistic variations and their significance. She also investigates how these findings can be applied to language pedagogy, in particular, the teaching of Japanese as a second/foreign language.