FDI Faculty Scholars, Fellows and Student Ambassadors

Dr. SungEun Min

Dr. SungEun Min is an assistant professor in the Elementary and Middle Level, Library, and Technologies Education Department at Kutztown University. Min earned his Ph.D. in elementary education and teacher education from the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Before coming to America, Min taught as a tenured elementary teacher in South Korea for eight years. 

Min’s primary research focus centers on ethnographic studies of teaching and learning from transnational and comparative perspectives. By applying post structural, new materialistic, and postcolonial theories, Min’s work explores the evolving concepts of teaching and learning, particularly in response to the influence of shadow education and digital technologies. For instance, Min employs Deleuze and Guattari's (1980/1987) nomadism and Said's (1978) orientalism to conceptualize Asian students' agency in shaping their preferred learning space as they navigate toward the new learning space of shadow education. 

Min’s doctoral dissertation delves into a digital ethnography of elementary teachers' curriculum planning practices within Indischool, a prominent grassroots online community for Korean elementary teachers. Through the lens of new materialistic theories, Min explores how the technological design and features of social media and online teacher communities intra (Barad, 2007) with teachers' identities and agencies. Indischool holds the potential to serve as a model for establishing dynamic and successful local teacher communities in the United States, including those representing BIPOC educators. 

Presently, Min is engaged in research focused on Asian American students, aiming to challenge stereotypes associated with this group and combat racism and white supremacy in society using Asian Critical Race Theory. Additionally, Min seeks to challenge the Northern-centric hegemony in global knowledge production within academia. Min accomplishes this by reimagining learning and teaching through the lens of non-Western theories, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and traditional sociocultural concepts from South Korea, such as "noon-chi" and "soo-da." 

https://sites.google.com/view/sungeun-min/hom 

Dr. Donato Fhunsu

Dr. Donato Fhunsu is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Kutztown University. He began his intellectual career as a scientist and then, with that scientific consciousness, settled in the humanities. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studies African American Literature in its global dimensions, that is, in its connections to and exchanges with Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latin American, Afro-European, continental African, Afro-Asian, and Afro-Oceanic Literatures and Cultures. A comparatist by training, his approach to literature is comparative, transnational, and multilingual. Informed by the Africana wisdom epistemology, ethics, and intellectual tradition of bumuntu, he is particularly interested in exploring how the literatures of the Global African Diaspora helps us reimagine and rethink the various articulations of human identity we have come to take for granted, from the early days of human societies to the 21st century: belonging, citizenship, nationality, religion, class, gender, sex, sexuality, race, color, ethnicity, body image, age, ability, and culture. Inspired by his grandmother, who was the chieftainess of her village, he seeks to understand the implications that kizoba (stupidity) and mambi (meanness) have for the individual, the community, and the natural environment, particularly in the context of imperialism and colonialism. 

As an integral part of his commitment to fully understanding and affirming the Africana human “lived experience” in the context of the broader human experience and his commitment to telling the fullness of Africana stories, Dr. Fhunsu does both scholarly writing and creative writing. 

His current research focuses on the life and work of Langston Hughes as a committed African American writer and global citizen with special connections to Kansas, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the world.