But the two never got a chance to go together.

“She fell when she was swimming in one of the Adirondack lakes and she had pain in her thigh, so she couldn’t hike anymore,” Tippelskirch said of a trip Sanford took before the two met.

Sanford, the chair of the language, linguistics and literature department, died Wednesday of an undisclosed illness. Friends, colleagues and students said she was a witty person and a devoted professor who kept much of her personal life private.

Though Sanford never fulfilled her dream of hiking in the Adirondacks with Tippelskirch, she did get to travel there for a faculty retreat, where she spotted a loon at night, Tippelskirch said.

At the faculty retreat, Sanford showcased her humorous side, Tippelskirch said. During a talent show on the last night of the retreat, she performed humorous poems and rhymes she had written during the course of the trip about things people had said or done.

“It’s not that I could quote any one joke that she told,” Tippelskirch said. “She had these humorous responses to any situation and also to remarks made at faculty meetings. That’s really extraordinary that she could pull that off.”

Sanford’s humor also carried into the classroom, said Drew Shields, a sophomore international relations and advertising major. Shields had Sanford as a professor in GER 201: “German III” in fall 2009, a class in which she made contextual jokes and brought a positive, humorous attitude to class every day, he said.

Shields said he did not care about getting a low grade in her class because she pushed the class to learn.

“I remember the first day of class she walked in, and for most of us it was the first 200 level and she immediately started talking in German nonstop and kind of offset us a little,” Shields said. “But she really got us into it, not just translating the words but thinking in a German mindset.”

Sanford took much pride in her Austrian heritage. She completed her doctorate in German and romance languages at the University of Vienna. During class she often incorporated Austrian culture into her lessons on German language and culture, Shields said.

Sanford kept her illness private. Shields said he and his classmates did not know about her illness until the end of the semester, when she told them she would not be teaching in the spring. After that, Shields said he did not hear anything more about her illness until he found out she died.

Karl Solibakke, an assistant dean of finance in the College of Arts and Sciences, said there were many things about her life she preferred not to share with the public, though she would tell her friends privately.

“Even until the day she died, she was very secretive about her illness. She did not want people to fawn all over her and to treat her like a sick person, and I think that’s a tribute to her own discipline,” Solibakke said.

Sanford was also devoted to her research on Goethe, specifically Goethe’s son, August. She wrote one volume on August and was in the process of writing another, which she made arrangements to get published when she died, said Erika Haber, a professor of Russian, in an e-mail.

Sanford tackled August, as opposed to Goethe, to give herself the challenge of targeting a niche subject, as Goethe is one of the most researched subjects in German literature, Solibakke said.

“August was not really a great literary person, but someone needs to sit down and comb through the texts and edit them and get them published, and that was what she was working on up until the day she died,” he said.

Above all, Solibakke said Sanford embodied three ideals of a professor: to dedicate herself to students, to create a warm and inviting atmosphere, and to provide a full perspective of the world.

Solibakke said he did not think Sanford would want those who knew her to linger on her death.

“And I think she would ask us not to mourn her with great pathos and drama,” he said. “I think she would just expect us to continue on and be happy that we knew her and happy that she was in our lives.”