Assistant Professor Irena Horvatić Bilić was born in Zagreb in 1969. She attended the Antun Augustinčić Elementary School in Zaprešić, and finished her high school education at the Language Education Centre in Zagreb. She enrolled in the study of German and English language and literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb in 1988, and graduated in 1995, after a longer study stay abroad (one semester at the University of Kansas, USA; two semesters at the University of Münster, FRG). Having defended her master’s thesis entitled Subjectively Motivated Simultaneous Bilingualism. Growing up Bilingual in a Natural Monolingual Environment, she obtained the academic degree of Master of Science in the field of humanities in 2003. She defended her doctoral dissertation entitled The Role of Multilingual Competence in Learning and Teaching a Second Foreign Language – German as L3 at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb on in June 2012. By the decision of the Committee for the Field of Humanities, she was elected to the scientific title of a research associate in the scientific field of humanities – the subfield of philology on in March 2017.  The Council of Social Sciences and Humanities confirmed her election to the scientific and teaching title of an assistant professor on in January 2023.

She started her career as a foreign language teacher at the high school level. From 1995 to 1998, she worked as a teacher of German and English in the XVIII. Grammar School in Zagreb. After that she thought English at the School of Foreign Languages within the Croatian Military Academy and also worked as a translator in the Protocol and Public Relations Department of the Cabinet of the Chief of Staff of the Croatian Armed Forces until 2001. For the next five years she was employed at the publishing house Školska knjiga, where she worked as a coordinator of international cooperation and editor for German as a foreign language until 2006.  From the academic year 2003/2004 until the academic year 2006/2007 she was engaged in parallel as an external associate at the Department of Intercultural German Studies at the Faculty of Teacher Education, University of Zagreb. She had a brief engagement at that faculty as an external associate again in the year 2021/2022, teaching two courses: Introduction to the linguistics of the German language and Theoretical grounds of foreign language teaching.

She has been employed at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb since December 2006, teaching courses German for the legal profession I – IV, English for the legal profession I – IV and German for the legal profession as an elective course in the ninth semester of the integrated undergraduate and graduate studies in law. She also teaches courses German language for public administration I – IV at the undergraduate level and at the specialist graduate level she teaches an elective course of German language for public administration. She also teaches German language courses at the Centre for Language and Law, and as a part of the offer for the lifelong education of the Faculty of Law, she prepares and leads programs on specialized linguistic and legal topics.

Within her scientific and professional activities she has held about thirty papers at international and domestic scientific conferences. She was a collaborator on the three-year scientific project Transfer as a strategy in foreign language learning between 2010-2012 at the University of Zadar and on the science popularization project Multilingualism as a resource in the period from 2017 to 2018. She has published about twenty scientific and professional papers, wrote a number of reviews, designed programs and contents of new courses, LSP courses as well as workshops and webinars for in service training of German language teachers. For many years she has been an author of the publishing house Školska knjiga, creating materials for learning German as a second foreign language, also as a co-author of the high school textbook zweite.sprache@DEUTSCH.de. She has co-authored the university textbook English for the Legal Profession, published by Narodne novine.

Her research interests include various aspects of the German and English languages for the legal profession, issues of multilingualism in educational context, methodology and didactics of third languages and language policy.

She supports the development of the professional field “foreign language teaching” as a long-term member and president of the Croatian Association of Teachers and Professors of German as a Foreign Language (www.kdv.hr). She closely cooperates with the International Association of Teachers and Professors of the German Language (https://idvnetz.org). She is a member of the Croatian Applied Linguistics Society (HDPL), of Croatian Philological Society (HFD) and the Association of LSP Teachers at Higher Education Institutions (UNJSVU).