Project Team

RANA RADDAWI
Associate Professor of Instruction, Arabic and Translation

Dr. Raddawi holds a PhD in Translation Studies Arabic/English/French from Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is fluent in five languages English, Arabic, French, Portuguese and Turkish with a fair knowledge of Spanish and Italian. Dr. Raddawi has many publications in International Journals in her areas of expertise. She is the editor of the book Intercultural Communication with Arabs (Publisher: Springer). She is also a certified interpreter and has a number of published translations into Arabic such as the books Happiness is a Serious Problem and Natural Medicine for Flu and Cold.  Her research interests relate to Gender Equity in the Language Curriculum and Critical Pedagogy, Curriculum Design and Cross-Cultural studies. She has more than 15 years of teaching experience in the West and the Middle East at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She was a keynote speaker at several international conferences and she is a member of the Salzburg Global Seminar group for Education. Professor Raddawi was chosen to be a Searle Fellow  for 2023-2024 with Professor Lys in the mentoring role.

MARCELO WORSLEY
Associate Professor of Education and Social Policy
Dr. Worsley is an Assocaite Professor in Computer Science and Learning Sciences. He directs the technological innovations for inclusive learning and teaching (tiilt) lab, which aims to develop pedagogical and technological solutions for supporting learning among diverse populations in hands-on, collaborative, environments. The goal of his research is to promote equity and advance society’s understanding of how students learn in complex learning environments.

HASHEEM HAKEEM
Assistant Professor of Instruction, French
Dr. Hakeem coordinates and teaches Elementary French in the Department of French and Italian. His research primarily focuses on queer and critical pedagogical approaches to French language teaching, discourse analysis, and minoritized instructor identity. His work has appeared in a variety of journals, and he is currently co-editing a journal issue for Arborescences on critical and decolonizing pedagogies in the context of French language education. In addition to being a member of the Steering Committee of the Diversity, Decolonization, and the French Curriculum (DDFC) Collective, Dr. Hakeem is also collaborating on an EDID initiative – funded by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences – to develop a charter for inclusive writing within the “Association des professeur.e.s de français des universités et collèges canadiens” (APFUCC).

JINGJING JI
Associate Professor of Instruction
Jingjing is a Ph.D. candidate in Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). At Northwestern University, she has taught various Chinese language courses at different levels, from novice to advanced, for heritage and non-heritage tracks. Jingjing’s research interests revolve around Chinese heritage language (CHL) education. Specifically, she focuses on various aspects, such as the development of educational materials, effective pedagogies, assessment, and family language policies related to CHL maintenance. She is also particularly interested in DEI in language education. Her project addressed that issue   won the first prize for Innovative Excellence in the Teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language awarded by the Chinese  Language Teachers Association (CLTA), USA, in 2021-2022. The project was reported by the newspaper The Daily Northwestern.  Jingjing’s publications have appeared various peer-reviewed journals. She recently co-authored and published a Chinese textbook for heritage beginners with Yan Liu, Grace Wu, and Min-min Liang, titled 传承中文Modern Chinese for Heritage Beginners. With diverse and inclusive content regarding identity, class and ethnicity, the book aims to serve as a stepping-stone for Chinese heritage students’ future Chinese learning, inspiring them to reflect on their identities, learn Chinese American history, and embrace their cultural heritage.

FRANZISKA LYS
Professor of  German
Dr. Lys is Professor of German, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the department of German, as well as the Director of the MENA Languages program.  Dr. Lys’ research is concerned with the application and evaluation of the effectiveness of media-related and technological innovations to improve the learning of foreign languages. For her various research projects, she received close to ½ million dollars of grant money. Dr. Lys is also an internationally recognized expert in the integration of culture in the language classroom and widely published in that subject. You can read more about her projects and research activities here.

RAGY MIKHAEEL
Associate Professor of Instruction, Arabic
Professor Mikhaeels teaching and research interest focuses on the integration of spoken dialect into the classroom. He has worked on several curriculum development projects, including the preparation of an Egyptian dialect version of Munther Younes’s Living Arabic textbook as well as an online tool to interact with audio and video explanations while analyzing annotated texts from the Arabic Manuscripts from West Africa collection in Northwestern’s Herskovits Library of African Studies.

SHANNON MILLIKIN
Associate Professor of Instruction, Spanish & Portuguese
Professor Millikin coordinates and teaches Spanish language and linguistics courses and her professional activity focuses on comprehension-based and task-based language pedagogies, internationalization of the curriculum, inclusive teaching practices, and open educational resources. She has secured grants for many pedagogical projects and research, including six Weinberg Hewlett Grants. Most recently these include a WCAS Curricular Funding Grant for a project titled “A Seat at the table for Afro-Latinx Voices,” and a Hewlett Grant for Curricular Innovation titled “Colombian Partnerships for Spanish Language and Cultural Competence.” You can read more about this here.

JULIA MOORE
Director, English Language Programs
Dr. Moore oversees English Language Programs (ELP) at Northwestern University, which provides English language instruction, proficiency testing, and orientation programs to international students and scholars in The Graduate School, and to the wider Northwestern community. Her areas of linguistic expertise include second language acquisition and pragmatics. Dr. Moore has extensive experience in curriculum development, program administration, graduate student training, and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Language (TESOL).

GREGORY WARD
Professor of Linguistics, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Philosophy
Dr. Ward is an American linguist, academic and researcher. His primary research area is discourse / pragmatics, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, and reference/anaphora. He has authored over 80 publications (including 4 books) and given over 150 talks and presentations. Recent publications have investigated demonstratives (with Ryan Doran), event anaphora (with Andrew Kehler), functional compositionality (with Betty J. Birner and Jeffrey Kaplan), and the semantics-pragmatics boundary (with a research team).

MICHAL WILCZEWSKI
Assistent Professor of Instruction
Michał Wilczewski is a historian of modern East Central Europe who specializes in Poland and Polish culture. At Northwestern, he teaches Polish language, literature, culture, and history, and courses on the history of sexuality in Eastern Europe. He is especially interested in queering language pedagogy.

ANA THOMÉ WILLIAMS
Professor of Instruction, Portuguese
Dr.  Thomé Williams areas of research and interest are intercultural communication, foreign and second language acquisition by speakers of Spanish, French, English and Portuguese, Technology in the Foreign Language Classroom, Lusophone studies, and Portuguese language teaching and learning in the USA. In the last years, Dr. Thomé Williams has presented research findings, lead workshops or given talks as a guest speaker in conferences in North or South America, Europe, Africa (Cape Verde) and Asia (Japan and Macao). Among her publications in chapter books and periodicals on language pedagogy, she has a book on cross-cultural media communication between France and Brazil and has recently co-edited a book about the effects of the Pandemic on Portuguese Language teaching. 

• Kydie Al Moutaa (worked with Rana-Arabic/English-summer 2023), Class of 2025: Neuroscience and Global Health
• Letícia Sukman de Mello (working with Ana Williams-Portuguese since Spring 2023), CLass of 2026: Communication Studies
• Ava Dahnke (McCormick, Chemical Engineering, Minor in German), Luke McGorry (McCormick, Biomedical Engineering, Minor in German), and Robert Swistelnicki (Graduate student, Department of German) are working with Domenic DeSocio and Franziska Lys, faculty members in the German department.
• Gabriel Restrepo Pardo (working with Shannon Millikin and Rana Raddawi), Ph.D. Candidate 2025, Latin American Literature and Culture
• Aven Peters (helping the group with the textbook analysis), PhD Candidate Sociology
• Aya Ibrahim (working with Ragy Mikhaeel on Arabic), Civil Engineering
• Amaya Mikolic-Berrios (working with Shannon Millikin on Spanish/French), Political Science
• Julia Neus (working with Shannon Millikin on Spanish) Radio, Television, & Film
• Noor Hamid, Medill, Minor in Arabic, and Youssef Ibrahim, Computer Science (both working with Rana Raddawi on Arabic)
• Laura Félix (working with Ana Williams on Portuguese), Computer Science
• Gabriela Prince Gonçalves (working with Ana Williams on Portuguese)  RTVF, School of Communication
• Annika Velasco (worked with Ana Williams on Portuguese in 2023), Psychology, Minor in Portuguese
• Emily Jackson, PhD Student in French, and Iain Millar, PhD Student in French (working with Hasheem Hakeem on French)
• Ahri Wu and Molly Chen (working with Jingjing, Ji and Professor Xiaorong Wang from University of Chicago on Chinese)
• Magda Slowakiewicz (working with Michal Wilczewski on Polish)
• Selin Tanış, Turkish Fulbright Language Teaching Assistant, Duru Onur, Neuroscience/Psychology, Emir Uzel, Industrial Engineering (all three working with Oya Topçuoğlu on Turkish)