Professional Bio

David Hanks is a researcher, language teacher educator, and language teacher whose interdisciplinary scholarship is located at the intersections of applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and education. His research focuses broadly on the linguistic anthropology of education and language policy, and more specifically on how posthumanist social theory can be leveraged to illuminate the socio-material processes of exchange and commodification that facilitate and constrain the emergence of dynamic and multiplicitous identity formations available to language users, learners, and teachers. He is particularly interested in applying this focus to the phenomenon of language learning in tourist locales, as exemplified in his dissertation work, a multi-year ethnography of language policy at an Indonesian language school for foreign visitors to Bali, Indonesia. David’s research has been supported by Udayana University in Bali, and has received generous funding and contributions from the Fulbright-Hays Program, American Indonesian Exchange Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, American Institute for Indonesian Studies, and Council of American Overseas Research Centers. Working with colleagues and students at Portland State University, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Applied Linguistics for fours year prior to coming to Penn State, David has also recently expanded his research focus into the potential affordances and drawbacks of generative “AI” platforms in language learning.