Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, chair of the University of North Texas Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures and a professor of German in the department, has been selected as the 2012 Post-Secondary Outstanding German Educator by the American Association of Teachers of German. 

The Outstanding German Educator awards are given annually in recognition of innovative teaching, extraordinary talent and exceptional leadership in the German teaching profession. Each year’s recipients include an elementary, middle school or junior high school educator; a high school educator; and a post-secondary educator. All of the recipients will receive Friedrich Gerstäcker Travel Grants, sponsored by the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation, to support travel to Germany in 2013.

With 5,000 members, the American Association of Teachers of German is the only national individual membership organization dedicated to the advancement and improvement of the language, literature and culture of German-speaking countries. AATG is open to teachers of German at all levels of instruction, and students interested in the teaching of German.  

Costabile-Heming is a former president of the association She became the chair of UNT’s Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures in August 2012, after serving three years as chair of the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Northern Kentucky University. From 1997 to 2008, she was a faculty member in Missouri State University’s Department of Modern and Classical Languages, and was associate dean in the College of Arts and Letters at Missouri State from 2005-2008. Costabile-Heming is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Washington University in St. Louis.

She was honored Nov. 17 during the awards presentation at the AATG Annual Meeting, which was held in conjunction with the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Annual Convention and World Languages Expo in Philadelphia. She plans to use her travel grant to go to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, a literature archive, library and museum located in Marbach, Baden-Württemburg, Germany, where she will begin research for a book on the German author Friedrich Christian Delius.    

— Nancy Kolsti, UNT News Promotions