Janice Aski

Professor of Italian, Director of the Italian Undergraduate program, and Director of the Center for Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Janice Aski is the recipient of the Rodica C. Botoman Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring, the Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching, and Colleges of the Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award. For 23 years, since her arrival at OSU in 2000, she served as director of the Italian language program, which involved curriculum development and training graduate student and associated faculty instructors. This enriching experience motivated her to get more involved in curriculum development by enrolling in workshops offered by the Drake University Institute of Teaching and Learning and then serving on the Arts and Humanities Panel of the Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee from 2013-2016, and as chair from 2014-2018. In addition, she served on the committee to revise the OSU General Education program (2017-2018) and on the GE Bookends committee in 2021.

Her research has had a dual focus: world language pedagogy and historical Italian/Romance linguistics. She has co-authored a popular first-year Italian textbook, Avanti!, and the Italian historical linguistics monograph, Iconicity and Analogy in Language Change, and has authored a variety of articles in both of these fields of expertise. At this point, she is concentrating on developing students’ intercultural competence by co-creating a new GE course, FRIT 3054: The 21st-Century Skill: Intercultural Competence for Global Citizenship, and the new certificate, Intercultural Competence for Global Citizenship. Her research focuses on identifying the most effective approaches for incorporating Intercultural Competence training into language courses and training instructors on these approaches.