Faculty

Bokyung Mun– Assistant Teaching Professor

Bokyung Mun received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University and joined the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures as an Assistant Teaching Professor in Korean. Her main research interests lie in the areas of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and Korean linguistics with particular focus on tense and modality. Her goal as a professor is to help students gain practical language skills as well as socio-cultural knowledge to better understand Korean culture and society. This motivates her to continue research on topics related to teaching and learning of Korean and Korean linguistics.

Chen-Yieh Catherine Yu– Retired Assistant Professor

Catherine Yu dedicated most of her professional life to teaching Chinese at Georgetown University and her efforts have been richly rewarded by her students. She has been awarded honorary membership in the Alpha Sigma Nu National Jesuit Honor Society, has been selected as one of Georgetown University’s top ten professors by the Georgetown University Student Association, recognized by Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers multiple times, and has consistently received excellent student evaluations for all the courses she has taught at Georgetown University.

Di Qi– Assistant Teaching Professor

I studied English language and literature in college where I also taught Chinese at both the U.S Strategic Language Initiative and the Ohio State University Chinese Flagship Program. Later I earned an M.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and an M.A.T. in Teaching English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education from Georgetown University. I began teaching Chinese at Georgetown as a graduate student and continue to teach here today with the hope that I can help the next generation of Hoyas achieve their Chinese language learning goals.

My research interests include various aspects of second language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, intercultural communication, and the comparison of Chinese and American business etiquette. A good teacher is constantly evolving and adapting to new students and situations, so I try to apply my research, pedagogical training, and linguistic theory to my teaching practice in order to become an increasingly effective educator.

Fei Ren– Associate Teaching Professor and Chinese Language Coordinator

Fei Ren joined the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures in 2010. Her research interests focus on temporality and modality in Mandarin Chinese, with special interest in the strategies that Mandarin Chinese uses to make reference to the future. She is also interested in foreign language teaching and learning. Her current research includes the temporal reference of Chinese modal auxiliaries, the interface of Chinese aspect and modality, and their pedagogical applications. She teaches advanced-level Chinese language courses and introductory course on Chinese linguistics.

Inku Marshall – Retired Associate Teaching Professor

After my graduation in Korea, I went to Germany in order to study further. I graduated summa cum laude from the University of Hamburg with a Ph.D. in Comparative Education and my minors were German Modern Literature and Linguistics. Afterwards, I was a research fellow for two years at the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg and was coauthor of a book on curriculum for German secondary schools. 

Since coming to America in 1986, I have devoted myself to the development of teaching methods for Korean as a foreign language as well as creating teaching materials on Korean language and culture for non-Korean peoples.

Jingyuan Zhang– Associate Professor (On Leave, 2019-2020)

Professor Zhang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University.  She held a tenured position in the Chinese Department and Institute of Comparative Literature at Peking University for 4 years, and later taught at Cornell and the UC Berkley before coming to Georgetown.  Her main research interests are in modern Chinese literature and culture, particularly in the relationship between psychoanalytic theories and Chinese culture.  At Georgetown she has taught courses on a wide range of topics on modern Chinese literature and culture, including film, media, and drama. As a member of the Steering Committee for the Comparative Literature Program at Georgetown, she has taught “Introduction to Comparative Literature.”  She is also an accomplished painter, and her art works have been featured in public exhibitions both in the U.S. and in China.

Jordan Sand– Professor of Japanese History and Culture

Jordan Sand is Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He teaches modern Japanese history and other topics in East Asian history, as well as urban history and the world history of food. He has a doctorate in history from Columbia University and an MA in architecture history from the University of Tokyo. His research and writing has focused on architecture, urbanism, material culture and the history of everyday life. House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2004) explores the ways that westernizing reformers reinvented Japanese domestic space and family life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent book, Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013), analyzes problems of history and memory in the postindustrial city. He has also examined the comparative history of urban fires and firefighting, the modernization and globalization of Japanese food (including sushi, miso, and MSG), and the history of furniture and interiors, and topics in the study of heritage and museums. He is presently working on a study of manifestations of colonialism in physical forms ranging from bodily comportment to urban planning.

From 2009 through 2011, he served as Chair of Georgetown’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. During academic year 2012-13, he was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Information Studies, where he taught a seminar on approaches to the modern city.

Juei-Chen Hsiao– Assistant Teaching Professor

Juei-Chen Hsiao received her M.A. in Foreign Languages and Literature from National Cheng Kung University in 2008. She taught at Columbia University and UC Berkeley before joining Georgetown University. She has taught classes from elementary to advanced levels, including Media Chinese, Business Chinese and Advanced Oral Communication. She has also taught and coordinated an intensive summer program in Princeton in Beijing and ICLP at National Taiwan University. Her academic interests encompass a range of topics in Chinese language teaching pedagogy, linguistics and Literature.

Kevin Doak– Interim Department Chair- Professor & Nippon Foundation Endowed Chair in Japanese Studies

Professor Doak specializes in the study of nationalism and democratic thought and culture in modern Japan, as well as in the literary, cultural and philosophical expressions of public thought and values. He has served as co-editor of The Journal of Japanese Studies and sat on the executive board of the Society for Japanese Studies. His writings in Japanese have been prominently published in major Japanese newspapers and journals and cited by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in his book Atarashii Kuni E (2013). Professor Doak’s current research focusses on issues related to politics and religion (especially Catholicism) in modern Japan, ranging from jurisprudence, fiction and literary works, and theology. After a sabbatical at The International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto in 2015, he published the results of that research in his most recent book, Tanaka Kotaro and World Law: Rethinking the Natural Law Outside the West (Palgravemacmillan, 2019).

Kumi Sato– Assistant Teaching Professor

I received my B.A. in English, minoring in Japanese Pedagogy from Kansai Gaidai University, Osaka, Japan. After two years of a teaching assistantship at Gettysburg College, I earned my M.A. in Asian Civilizations at the University of Iowa. I taught Japanese at the university throughout my graduate study, and joined the Japanese program at Georgetown University in 2001. I have taught beginning to advanced levels of Japanese language courses, and mainly teach Intensive First Level Japanese and Third Level Japanese at Georgetown University.

My research interests are second language acquisition and its pedagogical application. I am particularly interested in students’ language learning strategies and how to develop teaching methods to enhance their use of those strategies. As a fan of movies and drama, I also create materials that utilize those media to learn Japanese.

Aside from my teaching, I enjoy ballroom dancing, and playing piano. Taking piano lessons help me understand what my students are going through. It is fun and exciting, but can be frustrating sometimes! Regular, consistent practice is the key to mastering a new piece, and I find that process very similar to language learning. I also love cooking, and food always makes me happy!

Lihong Huang – Assistant Teaching Professor

Lihong Huang has taught all levels of Chinese language courses as well as created some upper level courses related to Chinese culture, society and politics, such as Topics in Current Affairs and Chinese in Diplomatic Discourse. In the spring semester of 2010, Georgetown students nominated her as one of the faculty members who they feel have most shaped their undergraduate experience at Georgetown in a meaningful way. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Georgetown University. Her research interests include cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, task-based language teaching, and language training and assessment for high-stakes tests. She has trained U.S. government employees for the Defense Language Proficiency Test 5 (DLPT) as well as worked as a linguist on test development for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). She also holds an M.A. in Teaching English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education from Georgetown University.

Michael McCaskey– Associate Professor Emeritus

I spent much of my childhood living overseas, and wasn’t very well
acquainted with the academic world in the United States. I decided to study at Stanford University because a number of American relatives lived nearby. Later I went to Japan to do graduate research. Then one of my Stanford professors, who had switched to Yale University, suggested that I should transfer to Yale, so I did.

When I finished my Ph.D. at Yale, I tentatively explored career opportunities. While I was growing up, a number of people told me that I should go to Georgetown University, because of its international focus. So, when I was offered a teaching position at Georgetown, I accepted it right away. It was a really good decision, and one I have never regretted.

Min Koo Choi– Assistant Teaching Professor/Korean Language Coordinator

I was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to the United States to expand my educational opportunities. I received my B.A. in English and my M.A. and Ph.D. in Korean at the University of Hawaii. I taught Korean language and culture at the Defense Language Institutes at Presidio of Monterey, CA for two years before I acquired my current position at Georgetown University. Since I was very young, I have been fascinated by all kinds of stories, such as fairy tales and folktales, and in the course of my higher education, my fascination developed into an interest in the idea of narrative. I am currently doing my scholarly research on the ways in which Korean intellectuals under Japanese colonial rule created new kinds of approaches to subjectivity through confessional self-narratives addressing the subject of love. I teach various Korean language courses as well as Korean history and culture courses taught in English at Georgetown University.

Motoko Omori– Assistant Teaching Professor

I received my B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Middlebury College, and earned my M.A.T. in Teaching English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education from Georgetown University. I started teaching at the university while working on my graduate degree. In recently years, I’ve been mainly teaching Intensive Second Level Japanese but I have taught beginning Japanese language course as well as courses structured for senior level Georgetown students. My main research interest is the use of computers to assist language learning. I’m a die-hard Boston Red Sox fan (and other New England sports teams) as I spent first 8 years of my life in America in New England. I am also a self-proclaimed computer geek and spend a lot of time on a computer when I’m not teaching!

Pei Shan Yu- Assistant Teaching Professor

Pei-Shan Yu received her Ph.D. degree in Language Education and dual Master’s degrees in Chinese Pedagogy and Language Education from Indiana University  Bloomington (IUB). She has been teaching various levels of Chinese language courses at IUB since 2009. Pei-Shan also had experience teaching in StarTalk and  Flagship Chinese Institute (FCI). She has served as a Chinese Pedagogy Specialist at the Chinese Flagship Center and Interim Associate Director of FCI before joining  Georgetown University. Her academic interests include curriculum design, Chinese pedagogy and language learning for Chinese heritage students.

Peng Wang– Assistant Teaching Professor

Peng Wang joined the faculty of the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Georgetown University in 2002, and has been teaching various levels of Chinese language courses, including Business Chinese and Intensive Chinese for Advanced Beginners. Prof. Wang has also taught Chinese language as the chief instructor at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua University, as well as a visiting professor at Oberlin College and Brown University. In the summer of 2010 and 2012, Prof. Wang served as the academic director for the State Department-sponsored CLS Program in Shanghai.

Philip Kafalas– Associate Professor

My specialty is literature in Classical Chinese, especially late-imperial memoirs and miscellanies (biji). I am particularly interested in how such texts construct and reflect their authors’ sense of spatial context—ranging from the spaces in which they lived and to which they felt loyalties (home, city, studio, remembered landscapes, empire) to the experienced realms of the supernatural and dream. My courses include an Introduction to Classical Chinese, traditional Chinese literature on war, depictions and explanations of dreams, landscape literature and painting, and tales of the supernatural. On the side I am an amateur musician.

Wen-Hui Li– Assistant Teaching Professor

I grew up in Shanghai, and attended East China Normal University. Prior to my graduate studies at Georgetown University in 1984, I had worked for the Shanghai Medical University, which is now the Medical School of Fudan University. I received my MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) in 1985, my PhD in Applied Linguists in 1993, and the University President’s Vicennial Award in 2010. I am interested in language acquisition, language teaching methodology, and I enjoy teaching and being with my students.

Yoshiko Mori– Associate Professor and Japanese Language Coordinator

Yoshiko Mori is Associate Professor and Director of the Japanese Language Program in Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Georgetown University. She holds a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her specialization is in second-language learning and instruction from a psycholinguistics perspective. Her research interests include cross-linguistic influences on vocabulary/kanji learning, the roles of metacognitive awareness in language learning, individual differences, and heritage language learning. Her work has been published in book chapters and major journals including Reading Research Quarterly, Language Learning, Modern Language Journal, Applied Psycholinguistics, Foreign Language Annals, and Language Teaching.

Yusheng Yang– Assistant Teaching Professor

Yusheng Yang received her undergraduate degrees in Education and English along with her Master’s degree in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language from the National Taiwan Normal University. Yusheng Yang has taught and served as level coordinator of beginners, intermediate, and advanced-level Chinese language courses at Georgetown University. She previously taught Chinese at Hamilton College in New York, ACC (Associated Colleges in China) in Beijing (both as coordinator and instructor), and regularly teaches at the Middlebury Chinese Summer School in Vermont. She co-authored Chinese Grammar Made Easy: A Practical and Effective Guide for Teachers, published by Yale University Press in 2008.