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Remembering Barbara: A Personal Tribute

News Categories: Centers | English | Faculty and Staff | General News

By Dr. Ulla M. Connor
Barbara E. and Karl R. Zimmer Chair in Intercultural Communication,
Professor of English and Director of the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication

My friend, Barbara Zimmer, passed away on August 7, 2010.  I will miss her dearly.

I met Barbara in 1984 in my first year of teaching at IUPUI.   She was a natural, gifted teacher, who always hungered to improve.  She enrolled in several of our new Teaching English as a Second Language graduate courses and discovered that linguistics could serve as a strong foundation for teaching.  Barbara taught Writing and English as a Second Language in the Department of English at IUPUI for 16 years and was a recipient of many prestigious teaching awards.  She later showed her trust in linguistics by endowing, with her husband Karl, a faculty Chair at IUPUI and requiring that the endowment include applied linguistics as the major discipline for the holder of the endowed chair.

In addition to being an academic colleague and mentor, over the years Barbara and I became fast friends.  Thanks to Barbara and Karl, my husband John and I have become involved in many activities in the city, which have been personally enriching. In all these activities, she has shown me that doing what is merely expected is not enough; in all that you do, it is the extra steps that lead to excellence. She also impressed upon me the importance of speaking one’s mind, something that came naturally to her.

Barbara was a tireless volunteer for countless organizations, serving as President of the Indiana League of Women Voters, the Crossroads Guild and the Indianapolis Woman’s Club. She was part of the Unigov Task Force, the Indianapolis Progress Committee, and the boards of Dance Kaleidoscope and the IUPUI University Library, among many others.

Born in Minneapolis, Barbara earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, where she met Karl, her husband of 61 years.  She later earned an M.A. in History from Butler University.  Her interest in intercultural communication was lifelong.  Together, she and Karl traveled the world, living for several years in Denmark, and later in Malaysia, where she taught expository writing through an IU School of Liberal Arts program. 

One of the very special things about Barbara was her handwritten thank you notes, something rare these days. I cherish the last one on February 19, 2010 in which she wrote of my new grandson, Jack: "truly a magical child - so good, so happy, so self-contained." She could have been writing about herself.

[Indianapolis Star Obituary]

Published on: August 18, 2010