Please join SLAT in congratulating Dr. Wenhao Diao on her appointment as Interim Head of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona! Dr. Diao is currently Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, and a faculty member in the interdisciplinary graduate program of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching at the University of Arizona. She also founded and co-directed the Center for East Asian Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center supported by the US Department of Education, at the University of Arizona. She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and her B.A. and M.A. from East China Normal University. As an applied linguist, she is interested in the identities and ideologies that Chinese language learning and teaching (re)produce and (re)distribute. Her research has primarily focused on Chinese language teachers in K-16 contexts, as well as the phenomenon of study abroad -- particularly going to and from China.
Her work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Chinese Language Teachers Association (USA). She was awarded a Fulbright-Hays grant in 2017 for her proposed project that connects educators in the U.S. with their peers in China. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Modern Language Journal, System, and so on. With her colleagues in the field, she has published an edited book entitled Language Learning in Study Abroad: The Multilingual Turn (Multilingual Matters, 2021) and a guest edited special issue themed Study Abroad in the 21st Century for the L2 Journal in 2016. Prior to joining the University of Arizona, she taught at Middlebury College, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Virginia, and East China Normal University.