EALC Faculty

Andy joined the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Wake Forest in 2012. His dissertation work at Harvard University focuses on the figure of the crowd in modern Chinese literature and visual culture. His current research concerns the film, visual culture, and literature from Taiwan in the 1960s. At Wake he teaches courses on premodern Chinese fiction, Chinese film, Sinophone literature and film, and popular culture.

Mari Ishida is an assistant professor of Japanese at the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Wake Forest University. She received Ph.D.  in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a concentration in Modern Japanese literature and cultural studies, and taught Japanese literature, film, culture, and language as an assistant adjunct professor at UCLA. Prior to her appointment at Wake Forest, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University.  Mari’s research and teaching interests include Japanophone literature, film, and popular culture, gender and sexuality in Japanese culture, and colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies. Mari is currently working on the academic monograph, which examines the function of literature in the discursive production of the multiethnic ideologies in the Japanese Empire from the 1920s to the 1940s. By looking at literary works by Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese writers writing in Japanese, her work traces how literature in the Japanese empire generates, maintains, and challenges the processes and effects of racialization and thereby takes part in the continuous reproduction of the imperialist worldview

Yaohua joined Wake Forest in 2002. He has taught all levels of Chinese language classes and courses in Chinese literature and film and East Asian cultures. His primary research interests are pre-modern Chinese vernacular fiction, Chinese modernism, and China’s encounters with the Wes

I came to Wake Forest in 1998 and have taught Japanese language courses at all levels as well as courses on Japanese culture. My areas of interest are second language acquisition, foreign language pedagogy, and curriculum development. I love teaching and try to keep current in my field through active involvement in a number of professional organizations. I also strive to enhance the cultural experience of students in our program and regularly organize events for them to learn about various aspects of Japanese culture

Qiaona joined Wake Forest in 2016. She has previously taught courses at all levels of Mandarin language and Business Chinese in the States and China. Her research specializes in the intersection between Chinese linguistics and second language acquisition and currently focuses on defining, assessing, and developing Chinese syntactic complexity. She is particularly interested in task-based language education, language for specific purposes, and cognitive linguistics

Kanako received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from the Ohio State University, where she developed expertise in Japanese linguistics and language pedagogy. She has been also involved in training future foreign language teachers in the Alliance for Language Learning and Educational Exchange (ALLEX). She serves as the Director of Japanese Teacher Training and the Japanese Language Program. 

Kanako’s scholarship has grown alongside of her enjoyment of teaching. Her research interest lies at interactional sociolinguistics, pragmatics, intercultural competence, second language acquisition, and language pedagogy. She takes special interest in examining cultural convention in conflict strategies in a Japanese enterprise setting. Kanako is a certified ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview Tester of Japanese and ACTFL Written Proficiency Tester of Japanese.