About Jenna Min Shim …

PhD candidate, University at Albany

Jenna Min Shim received a Master of Music degree in piano performance from Manhattan School of Music in New York City in 1996. Her career as a performing artist led her to view music as a semiotic medium that affords and facilitates communication across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Firmly believing that music’s semantic potentials are as important as (if not more important than) its acoustic potentials, Jenna became increasingly interested in the more general issue of communication involving people who are from very different cultural and social backgrounds.

In 2001, Jenna received a teaching certificate in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from University of California at Los Angeles. For many years, she taught English as a second language, linguistics, and TESOL methods, mostly working with elementary and secondary public and private school teachers whose first language was not English. During this time, Jenna became increasingly haunted by the fact that learning linguistics skills is but a small part of what it means to communicate effectively across linguistic and cultural boundaries and what it means to become literate in multiple languages.

In 2005 Jenna joined the Reading Department at University at Albany. Since then she received MS and CAS degrees, and she is currently a Ph.D. candidate. Her current research focuses primarily on understanding how people make sense of differences in intercultural contact zones. This research is particularly pressing at a time when globalization is more prevalent than ever (Appadurai), when our nation is experiencing more segregation than at any point in history (Kozol), and when neocolonialism is at work in increasingly invisible and pernicious ways (Said).