Tatjana Babic Williams

Senior Lecturer of Italian
Coordinator of Advanced Language Sequence
Director of Italian Studies
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Purdue University

Specialization

Tatjana Babic Williams is a Senior Lecturer of Italian at Purdue University, where she teaches all levels of Italian language, culture, and literature courses. Her research interests include intercultural pedagogy, African-Italian literature, immigration, and postcolonial studies. Currently she serves as the Director of Italian Studies and manages advertisement and outreach of the Italian Program, promotes student recruitment and retention efforts, and co-organizes the Italian events.

Since 2016, Tatjana has engaged in an intensive collaboration with Purdue’s Center for Intercultural Learning, Mentorship, Assessment, and Research (CILMAR), which provided opportunities for theoretical and practical training in intercultural learning through numerous grants and fellowships. With CILMAR’s support, Tatjana and the Italian team operationalized a large-scale redesign of the Italian curriculum to embed systematic and intentional intercultural learning at the level of the entire Italian Program, for which she received the AAUSC Excellence in Language Program Direction Award for Curricular Innovation in 2022.

Currently, Tatjana serves as CILMAR Faculty Fellow, and provides leadership and mentorship in formalized CILMAR training programs such as Worldview Workshops, ELEVATE, and the Purdue Intercultural Learning Community of Practice (PICLCoP). She has organized webinar series, presented at conferences, led workshops and invited lectures, and published on the topic of intercultural learning and assessment in world languages.