Susan Babilon

Lecturer of Foreign Languages and Literatures
Olin Hall 335
(509) 527-4700
babilos@whitman.edu

Professor Susan Babilon has been interested in second language acquisition for as long as she can remember. Growing up bilingual in New York, surrounded by a multitude of tongues from all over the world, she could not help but develop a fascination for foreign languages. After studying some Spanish and French in school in addition to the German she grew up with, Babilon settled on a German major. She completed my M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at the City University of New York, with one year of study in Munich at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

Her dissertation is a study of the influences which led the Dadaist, Hugo Ball, to the development of sound poetry. Ball attempted to recreate a primal language, based on pure sounds, unadulterated by historically-developed connotations . . . sounds from the soul. This interest in the "magic" of the word is what underlies her other scholarly pursuits. She is particularly interested in the relationship between the visual arts and literature, and attempts to transcend the spatial and the temporal.

But what Babilon loves most is teaching the German language, especially the exciting introductory phases, where a new world of communication (and sometimes a whole new personality) comes alive for the learners. She has been at Whitman since the fall of 1994.