Yeonhee Yoon

Biography

Dr. Yoon teaches Korean language and culture courses and currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures (EALC). She has also served as the Korean Program Coordinator since 2013. Prior to joining Notre Dame, she taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Harvard University. Her current research interests include intercultural pragmatics, Korean popular culture, and Korean for specific purposes.

Her publications include book chapters such as “Korean Society” in Essentials of Korean Culture (Korea University Press, 2013); “Curriculum Development of Korean Language for Diplomacy” in Developing Courses in Languages for Specific Purposes (University of Hawai‘i, 2015); “Anti-Korean Wave in Japan: Identity Clash?” and “Yet to Crest: The Korean Wave and Korean Language Learning” in The Korean Wave: From a Private Commodity to a Public Good (Korea University Press, 2020); “How to Say ‘No’ in Korean: Sociopragmatic and Pragmalinguistic Analysis of Korean Speech Acts of Refusal” in The Routledge Handbook of Asian Linguistics (Routledge, 2022); and “The Globalization of the Korean Language in the Context of South Korea-China Relations” in The Routledge Handbook of the Sociopolitical Context of Language Learning (Routledge, 2025). 

She is the author of Korean Hedges in Spoken Discourse (Korea University Press, 2016) and the editor of The Korean Wave: From a Private Commodity to a Public Good (Korea University Press, 2020).

Prof. Yoon has received the University of Notre Dame's Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2019.