Faculty

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

ag5532@hunter.cuny.edu

April Goehrke received her PhD in East Asian Studies from New York University, and has a background in Japanese history, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology. She studied the Japanese language at the Interuniversity Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama after which she spent time as an exchange researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo. April wrote her dissertation on eroguro nansensu, an art and comics movement which is the contemporary form of the mass consumer culture movement of the same name from the 1920's and 30's. She currently teaches Japanese history and a variety of Japanese culture courses throughout the CUNY system. Her research interests include contemporary Japanese culture, and the evolution of trends in mass and popular culture.

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

hafferty@washington.edu

Philip Hafferty received his MA in art history from the University of Washington in Seattle, where he specialized in the built environment of the Japanese Way of Tea (Chado; Tea Ceremony), and his BA in East Asian studies from Harvard University. He received a scholarship to study the Japanese language for a year at Waseda University in Tokyo, and a yearlong fellowship to immerse himself in the Urasenke Chado Tradition at the Urasenke Gakuen Professional College of Chado in Kyoto. The current Iemoto, grand master, of the Urasenke Chado Tradition awarded him his chamei tea name, Sōken, giving him status as a 2nd-degree instructor in the tradition. He has given lectures on the Way of Tea across the United States, as well as on the sea with the Holland America Cruise Line, and is currently an instructor at the Urasenke Chanoyu Center of New York. He succeeded in passing the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, and the second highest level of the Exam of the Culture of the Way of Tea (Chadō Bunka Kentei).

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

ek1687@hunter.cuny.edu

Emi Kikuchi was born and raised in Ibaraki, Japan and came to the US in 1989. She received BA in Japanese Literature and teaching license of Japanese as national language and Japanese Calligraphy while in Japan. Also, she was trained and worked as an actor and a narrator, she recorded audio for Japanese and English language textbooks. As an educator, she has taught Japanese language, calligraphy and culture at various public schools, companies and colleges in NYC and currently she is teaching Japanese language at Hunter College, The City College of New York and Nippon Club. She also teaches kimono, Japanese traditional costume, and conducts workshops and demonstrations at schools, libraries, and museums.

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

mk5973@hunter.cuny.edu

Mana Kobuchi-Philip grew up in Fukuoka City, though she lived in Tokyo, where her Japanese teaching career began. Later she moved to the US, and after that the Netherlands, where she continued teaching Japanese. Along the way, she obtained an MA in TESOL from School for International Training (Brattleboro, VT), and a PhD in linguistics from CUNY graduate center. Back from Europe, she taught Japanese and linguistics at Queens College for several years, and then joined the Hunter Japanese Program in Fall 2021. Mana greatly enjoys teaching Japanese, as she herself is fascinated by language in general, and by Japanese in particular. If you ask her anything about Japanese grammar, she will love your questions!

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

vk690@hunter.cuny.edu

Vicki Li is a Linguistics Ph.D. student at the CUNY - Graduate Center, studying sociolinguistics, Asian American variants of English, and Japanese Linguistics. Previously a student of Hunter College's Japanese Program herself, she now teaches Elementary Japanese as an adjunct lecturer. Her research interests include social media and media discourse which she is looking to investigate along with Japanese linguistics and Japanese culture in modern youth.

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

ap7727@hunter.cuny.edu

Allison Markin Powell is a literary translator, editor, and publishing consultant. She received the 2020 PEN America Translation Prize for The Ten Loves of Nishino by Hiromi Kawakami. She was the co-organizer and co-host of the Translating the Future conference, and is a founding member of the translator collectives Cedilla & Co. and Strong Women, Soft Power.

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

mn1869@hunter.cuny.edu

Mari Nakamura was born in Yokohama and raised in Tokyo. She has in MA from The Ohio State University and has taught Japanese for 30 years, including at the University of Hawaii, Indiana University, Harvard University and the University of Maryland. She prepares students for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. She has taught business people from several Fortune 500 corporations and is a published author on the topic of Japanese linguistics.

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

ks2833@hunter.cuny.edu

Professor Saito is an adjunct lecturer in Japanese at CUNY. She earned her M.S. in Education from Long Island University Hudson. She specializes in online language teaching and developed a fully online Japanese language course for Brooklyn College in 2017. She has implemented the Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach, or SOFLA (Marshall, 2017) into her online courses and presented her research on SOFLA at multiple international conferences and workshops. She has taught college-level Japanese online courses to students around the world. She was selected as the first-year participant in the Japan Language Exchange program by the Japan Foundation Center for the Global Partnership in 1992. She holds NYS Teaching Certificate and also teaches Japanese at a public secondary school.

Office

Hunter West 1321

Phone

212-772-5064

Email

my1484@hunter.cuny.edu

Megumi Yui is Professor Emerita at Surugadai University, Japan, and joined the Japanese Program at Hunter College in 2023. She finished her doctoral course work at the University of Tokyo. Her research fields are semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics, and her research interests include categories which are shown in words/morphemes, especially in compounds and classifiers; metaphor which expresses how people perceive things; the relationship among names, address terms, and identity; and the way how respect/consideration is expressed in English and Japanese. Yui has been teaching mainly linguistics courses, which include cognitive linguistics, English linguistics, Japanese linguistics, contrastive linguistics, with Inter/Cross-cultural communication, American/British Cultures, and English/Japanese as a foreign language for about 30 years. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, UK, and at the University of California, Berkeley. The grants she received include the Rotary International Scholarship, and the Special Research Grant from Surugadai University. She has an M.A. in language and information science from the University of Tokyo, an M.A. in linguistics from Indiana University as a Rotary Scholar, a B.A. in English language and literature from Waseda University, and a B.A. in Law from Keio University.