Nina P. Tanti
Biographical Information
Madame Tanti began her teaching career in 1983 when she taught English as a foreign language to adults while living in France. She fell in love with teaching and never left the classroom. From 1979 to 1981 she studied at the Université de Poitiers, France, where she completed the Diplôme Supérieur d'Etudes Françaises (1981). Madame Tanti received her B.A. in French from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982 and her M.A. in French from San José State University in 1996. Her Master’s thesis is a study of the animals and animal imagery in the poetry of the Senegalese poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor. Madame Tanti has taught French at San José State University, San José City College, De Anza College and Mission College. In 2005 she earned an M.A. in English from the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San José State where she was the winner of the Mara Steffey Award for outstanding graduate achievement in the study of literature. In 2010 her translation (French to English) of a book of folktales from Burkina Faso was published. Madame Tanti lived in France for over 10 years with her French husband and two French-born children. She returned with her family to the United States in 1993 and has been teaching French at Santa Clara University since 1996. She was the director of the Peer Educator Program from 2013 to 2019. From 2007 to 2014 Madame Tanti served on the executive committee of the Santa Clara Valley chapter of the Alliance Française as newsletter editor. She remains involved in many language teaching associations such as the California Language Teacher Association (CLTA), the Foreign Language Association of Northern California (FLANC), the American Association of Teachers of French (AATF) and the Stanford World Language Project (SWLP) Besides teaching, attending workshops and mentoring students, her passions are yoga, reading, hiking and working in her California native plant garden.
Research Interests
- Second Language Acquisition
- Youth and Children's Literature
- Poetry and folktales from Francophone Africa
- Translation Studies
- Elementary French 1, 2, 3
- Intermediate French 21, 22
- Advanced Writing Fr 103
- Translation Fr 104
Sissao, Alain-Joseph. Folktales from the Moose of Burkina Faso. Trans. Nina Tanti. Bamenda (Cameroon): Langaa Research and Publishing Common Initiative Group, 2010.
Lasseni-Duboze, Victoire. “Africa of my Ancestors,” and “Life in the Village.” Trans. Nina Tanti. Women in French Studies 14 (2006): 129-130.