Prof. Iwona Sadowska has taught at Georgetown University since 2005 and brings over a decade of experience in the linguistics field. She teaches Polish and Russian language courses at Georgetown and is currently working on a book, Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar, which is under contract with Routledge Press to be published in 2009. At Georgetown, she has set up Polish conversation hours, Polish film screenings and discussions, and guest lectures, including by former Polish President and Georgetown Professor Aleksander Kwaśniewski.

Sadowska did her graduate studies in Slavic languages at the University of Gdańsk (Uniwersytet Gdański) in Gdańsk, Poland and was awarded a fellowship by the Polish Ministry of Education to study at the Pushkin Russian Language Institute (Государственный институт русского языка имени А.С. Пушкина) in Moscow, Russia. Her fields of interest include sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, and she did her thesis work on Образование и функционирование имен существительных с уменьшительно-ласкательными суффиксами в русском языке (The Creation and Function of Nouns with Diminutive and Emotive Suffixes in the Russian Language).

Sadowska has worked extensively with language schools in the Washington metropolitan area, overseeing instruction in over 40 languages for students from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Defense Language Institute, the U.S. Department of State, and other institutions. In her work, she has developed innovative curricula and teaching methodologies, trained instructors in language pedagogy, and run seminars on Russian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese language testing at the IMF to harmonize assessment methods and levels. She pioneered an intensive program at the IMF to train Spanish native speakers to serve as Portuguese to Spanish interpreters, and she has participated in the U.S. Government's Interagency Language Roundtable. She has run the Polish language program at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., and she has extensive experience teaching introductory through advanced Russian and Polish, including to U.S. and other diplomats.

Professional Affiliations

• American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS)
• American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL)
• American Center of Polish Culture, Washington, D.C.
• Kościuszko Foundation, New York, NY
• Modern Language Association (MLA)
• Polish Library, Washington, D.C.