Dr. Jill Beckman is the Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, as well as the DEO and Associate Professor of German.

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. 

Dexin Dai holds an MA degree in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and is a doctoral student in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Iowa. She taught Intermediate Chinese courses in the Confucius Institute of Mexico City, and Beginning Chinese courses at Binzhou Medical University, China. Currently, she serves as a teaching assistant in the Chinese Program of Asian and Slavic languages and Literatures at the UI and teaches first-year and second-year Chinese courses. Her research interests include second language reading, Chinese pedagogy, and technology in language teaching.

Emilie 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.

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

Becky Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor and Honors Advisor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She is also the Director of the Multilingual Syntax Lab.

Course Management for Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures, Department of French & Italian, Translation Programs, BTAA CourseShare, and WLLC courses. Graduate Coordinator for French and Literary Translation

Gabbie holds a bachelor’s degree in English. She taught English Language Learning in the Clear Creek Amana School District and worked in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Office of the Dean prior to becoming Division Administrator for the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures in 2023. Her interests include building sustainable staffing and communication structures; fostering a strong multicultural community; and supporting the Division in its mission to advance interdisciplinary research, artistic creativity, global awareness, and the study of languages, literatures, linguistics, societies, regions, and cultures. She collaborates with the staff team and faculty leadership to facilitate administrative operations and strategic planning.

Margaret H. Mills was a Professor of Russian language and linguistics and the former Chair of the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan (1985) and her MPH from the University of Iowa (2005). She has spent 30 years studying, consulting, and conducting linguistic and public health field work and research in the Soviet Union and Russia.

Kristine Muñoz (Fitch until 2010) is a Professor in the Departments of Spanish and Portuguese and in the Department of Communication Studies. Her ethnographic work began in Colombia with a Fulbright Dissertation grant in 1987 and continues through the present day with a second Fulbright Research and Teaching grant scheduled for Spring, 2022.

Yumiko'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.

Bruce Nottingham-Spencer spent time abroad at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany. He currently supervises the Elementary German program and teaches a variety of courses including German Composition and Conversation, and Business German. His interests include Historical Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Language Pedagogy, Second Language Acquisition, Crime Fiction, and Germanic Mythology.

In Christine Shea's research she studies the acquisition of second language phonetics and phonology. She concentrates on Spanish and English mainly, but also other Romance languages. Her main focus is on how variability in production and perception affect acquisition. Recently, she and her students have examined the role of dialect and allophonic variability in language processing across different contexts and by different learner groups.

Helen Shen is the DEO of Asian & Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Iowa. Her main research areas are Chinese L2 literacy development focusing on orthographic knowledge development and cognitive process of Chinese characters, reading education in Chinese, and instructional theories in teaching Chinese as a second language.