Our Team

Below you’ll find information about the team behind APRI. To learn about our instructors, visit our Language Offerings.

Catherine Baumann – Co-founder and Director of Curriculum and Instruction

Catherine Baumann is the Director of the University of Chicago Language Center and oversees all of its programs. Her responsibilities in APRI include the oversight and implementation of the reading curricula, and the appointment, evaluation and ongoing professional development of APRI’s instructors. She received her Ph.D. in Second Languages and Cultures Education at the University of Minnesota, specializing in reading comprehension and language testing, and contributes to a variety of professional journals and volumes. She is currently working on a historical review and renewed argument for the use of open-ended constructed response test tasks to measure reading comprehension and make possible the measurement of comprehension skills as they manifest themselves in the real world.

Darcy Lear – Strategic Initiatives Administrator

Darcy Lear is the Strategic Initiatives Administrator at the Academic and Professional Reading Institute. She has been at the University of Chicago since 2013, initially teaching Spanish in Romance Languages and Literatures. It was her specialty area of Languages for Specific Purposes that brought her into the Chicago Language Center’s orbit, where she has participated in various innovative programs and offerings. She received her Ph.D. in Foreign and Second Language Education at the Ohio State University. 

Nicholas Swinehart – Co-founder and Director of Online Pedagogy

Nick is the Managing Director of Instructional Technology for the University of Chicago Language Center. He oversees the design, development, and delivery of online pedagogy within APRI seminars. His research has been published in Computer Assisted Language Learning and the CALICO Journal, and he is co-author of Teaching Languages in Blended Synchronous Learning Classrooms: A Practical Guide.