Professor Emerita of German Studies, University of Arizona
Renate Schulz came to the U.S. from Germany in 1958. She holds a Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education from The Ohio State University. Before coming to the University of Arizona in 1981, she taught in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, at Otterbein College (Ohio), at the State University College of New York at Buffalo, and at the University of Arkansas. She also held visiting appointments at the United States Air Force Academy, the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico, and at the University of Leipzig, Germany. She retired from the University of Arizona in 2009 and re-joined the U.S. Peace Corps in June 2011 for service as an Education and Literacy Volunteer in Mali, West Africa.
Her research interests lie in the areas of second language acquisition, language and culture teaching, assessment, and foreign language teacher development. She has lectured and published widely on those topics. She is a past president of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers' Associations (NFMLTA) and of the American Association of Teachers of German (
AATG). She also is a past editor of
Die Unterrichtspraxis: The Teaching of German, and currently serves on the editorial advisory board of the
Modern Language Journal (MLJ).
She has received numerous awards, among them the "Bundesverdienstkreuz erster Klasse" from the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Henry and Phyllis Koffler Prize for Outstanding Accomplishments in Teaching, and the 2008 ADFL Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession. In her free time she enjoys exploring other cultures, going to the theater, listening to jazz, reading, and collecting folk art.
