Dr. Mary Wildner-Bassett earned her B.A. at Eastern Illinois University, her M.A. (with distinction) at the University of Wisconsin, and her Ph.D. at the University of Bochum, Germany in 1983. After teaching at the Zentrales Fremdspracheninstitut at the University of Hamburg for two years, she joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1986. Her publications include Improving Pragmatic Aspects of Learners' Interlanguage (Tübingen, 1984), Zielpunkt Deutsch (New York, 1992) and many contributions to anthologies and journals on foreign language pedagogy and second language acquisition, applied linguistics, and computer-mediated second language communication.
She served as the Dean of the College of Humanities from 2008 to 2016. She is also a faculty member of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT). She enjoys teaching culture and language courses on the undergraduate level, professional development, pedagogy, and applied linguistics theory and application courses on the graduate level, and any teaching that involves computer-mediated communication, using the COH-Lab facility at the College of Humanities.
She likes music, camping, and hiking, and takes particular delight in her three bilingual teenagers. Some colleagues have facetiously accused her of using them for linguistic data-gathering purposes.