Julian is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics at Penn State. His research is broadly interested in the nexus of communication technology (i.e., social media), ideology,  subjectivity, and the discursive construction of race, gender, and nation. His work examines how internet users reproduce and disrupt oppressive ideologies and power structures through their everyday and "non-political" interactions with each other on social media. His research  also aims to develop conceptual and analytical approaches to social media studies. 

email: jcanjura [at] psu.edu

Zhiye Ding is a dual-title Ph.D. student in Applied Linguistics and Asian Studies at Penn State. He graduated with a dual BA in Sociology from Duke Kunshan University and Duke University, and an MA in Anthropology from University of Chicago. His current research interests include linguistic anthropology, language ideology, discourse analysis, and queer linguistics. Drawing on ethnographic and other qualitative methods, he is particularly interested in how language mediates power relations and shapes social identities and norms across educational, familial, and other everyday settings in contemporary China. 

email: zfd5117 [at] psu.edu

Jung In Lee is a dual-title Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics and Asian Studies at Penn State. Their research examines media and institutional discourse in South Korea through critical discourse analysis, with particular interest in the ways in which how discourse (re)produces social and political ideologies across contexts. A central strand of their work engages language, gender, and sexuality, queer subjectivities and citizenships, and coming-out narratives as discursive, temporal, and affective practices. They also engage with decolonial and southern approaches, which shape their methodological and epistemological commitments to questioning Eurocentric assumptions about language, subjectivity, and knowledge production within and beyond applied linguistics.

email: jungin [at] psu.edu

Alex Koch is a PhD student in Applied German Linguistics. They graduated from Indiana University in 2022 with a degree in German and Anthropology. They completed their Master’s degree at University of Colorado Boulder in German Studies. Here they wrote a MA thesis titled “Becoming Inclusive: an Intersectional Analysis of ZDF’s Becoming Charlie”. Their current research is the sociolinguistic look into how identity, performance, and language interact, specifically looking at nonbinary speakers in Berlin, Germany. 

email: ark6340 [at] psu.edu

Hannah is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics at Penn State. Their work explores the relationship between second language socialization and politics—particularly how new speakers of minoritized languages use their semiotic and cultural resources to engage in novel forms of political participation. Hannah’s dissertation project adopts linguistic ethnographic methods to examine queer linguistic and cultural activism among new speakers of Yiddish. Before coming to Penn State, Hannah worked as a language and literacy educator in Philadelphia.

email: lukow [at] psu.edu

Elanur Sönmez is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on multilingualism, migration, and language and identity. More specifically, Elanur is interested in the discursive construction of agency in migratory contexts, with particular attention to migrant women’s lived experiences. Drawing on qualitative approaches such as linguistic ethnography, discourse analysis, and narrative inquiry, her work examines how language practices intersect with embodiment and gendered and social hierarchies across contexts in Turkey and the United States.

email: ejs6735 [at] psu.edu