A former Italian consular officer, Barbara Baraff returned to school to become a language teacher and received her Ph.D. in Italian from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1988 she has taught Italian at all levels at City College of San Francisco and at UCB, where she was named Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, a campus-wide award.  In 2001 she was nominated to Who's Who Among America's Teachers. She has also been the faculty leader for the San Francisco State University summer program in Florence, Italy, and director of the Italian summer workshop at UCB.
Professor Baraff's Italian classroom is a supportive environment, where students feel at ease, free of the fear of making a mistake and motivated to speak. Her goal is to create the illusion that one is a foreign student somewhere in Italy and to transmit the joy that knowing another language and culture can bring with passion, consideration and humor.