Adjunct Professor of French
Karina Penkethman, M.A. earned a Masters in French from the University of Arizona with an emphasis in Francophone literature. She spent her college summers working in France, Belgium, and French-speaking Switzerland, eventually moving to Finland where she lived and worked for several years. Karina began teaching French at Westmont in 2020-2021, teaching introductory through intermediate levels and Francophone literature. She returned to Westmont in the Fall of 2024. Karina’s interests include communicative teaching approaches and the diverse literature, culture, and history of the francophone world. In addition to French, she is fluent in Finnish. In her free time, Karina enjoys the outdoors, good books, writing, painting, and playing piano.
Adjunct Professor of German
Michael Hofmann was born and raised in Germany and received a Bachelor in Religious Science from the Augustana Hochschule Neuendettelsau and a Master in Business Administration from the University of Applied Sciences in Ansbach. Michael has been an Instructor in the Department of Modern Languages at Westmont since 2018 and is currently teaching introductory and intermediate level classes. He also has regular teaching appointments at the University of California Santa Barbara in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies as a continuing lecturer. His interests include second language acquisition, communicative teaching methodology, German literature, and German as it relates to and used in everyday business life. He speaks English in addition to German and has a reading knowledge of Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. In his free time he enjoys traveling, cooking, baking, and spending as much time as possible outdoors, enjoying the Santa Barbara area.