Dr. Tatjana Babic Williams

CILMAR Faculty Fellow, Senior Lecturer of Italian, Director of Italian Studies
Stanley Coulter Hall 128A
Phone: (765) 494-8586
Email: tbabic@purdue.edu

Tatjana Babic Williams, PhD, is a CILMAR faculty fellow and is a senior lecturer of Italian and the director of Italian Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures, College of Liberal Arts. Her responsibilities include:

• organizing Purdue InterCultural Community of Practice (PICLCoP) events
• developing intercultural learning curricula
• consulting with faculty on curriculum mapping, embedding, and assessment of intercultural learning innovations

Tatjana Babic Williams, PhD, teaches all levels of Italian language, culture, and literature at Purdue. Her research interests include intercultural pedagogy, African-Italian literature, immigration, and postcolonial studies. Tatjana is a sort of “CILMAR graduate” – since 2016, she has engaged in an intensive collaboration with CILMAR, which provided opportunities for theoretical and practical training in intercultural learning (ICL) through numerous grants and fellowships.

With CILMAR’s support, Tatjana operationalized a large-scale redesign of the Italian curriculum to embed systematic and intentional intercultural learning at the level of the entire program. She has experience in intercultural curricular design and assessment in face-to-face and virtual learning environments. Tatjana is the leader of the School of Languages and Cultures Intercultural Learning Community, and she has organized a webinar series, presented at conferences, and led workshops on the topic of intercultural learning and assessment in world languages.

Tatjana seeks opportunities to collaborate on:

• designing intercultural learning materials
• curricular mapping and embedding ICL at the course and program levels
• organizing and facilitating ICL training events for students, staff, and faculty

Fun fact: Tatjana was born and raised in Croatia, studied in Italy, and completed her graduate studies in the US, where she finally settled (for now, at least) with her family. She speaks four languages and can somewhat understand a couple more. She enjoys traveling and learning about different cultures. Despite having had intercultural experiences, she could not make much sense of it all until she discovered this thing called intercultural learning. She wholeheartedly agrees with John Dewey: we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on our experience.