David was born and raised in the Portland metropolitan area and is proud alum of Portland State University. Building on his experience learning Russian at Portland Community College, David transferred to PSU first to pursue a bachelor of arts in Russian before then discovering the world of Applied Linguistics along the way.
After graduation, David moved to Fukushima, Japan, to teach English in as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. There he developed his passion for language teaching, noticing at the same time the often incongruous relationship between educational policy and practice in schools and its effects on learners' understanding of themselves as language users. Upon returning to the US, David was very fortunate to get a job working with the amazing staff at PSU's IELP (Intensive English Language Program), which provided an invaluable service to the wider Portland community for decades before its closure in 2024. In that role David assisted international students new to the US and to American higher education in integrating their English learning experiences with preparation for future educational opportunities and building new and lasting relationships to Portland, its culture, and life at PSU.
These experiences spurred David to pursue a master of science in education in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and a doctorate in Educational Linguistics and International Education Development at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. His research focuses broadly on the linguistic anthropology of education, and more specifically on how insights from the fields of language policy and posthumanism can illuminate the socio-material processes of exchange and commodification that produce dynamic and multiplicitous identities for language users, learners, and teachers. David's award-winning multi-year ethnographic dissertation research on language learning for tourism in Bali, Indonesia (supported by Udayana University in Bali), has received generous funding and support from the Fulbright-Hays Program, American Indonesian Exchange Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, American Institute for Indonesian Studies, and Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
At PSU his research with faculty and students in the Applied Linguistics and World Languages & Literatures departments has been accepted for presentation at the American Association for Applied Linguistics and for publication in the journal Language Teaching Research later this year. In addition to courses in the Department of Applied Linguistics, David has also taught courses for the Portland Institute Nanjing in the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science and for International Special Programs in the Center for International & English Learning. He also currently teaches first-year Russian courses at Portland Community College.
Courses Taught
- LING 232 — Language & Society
- LING 233 — Language & Mind
- LING 390 — Introduction to Linguistics
- LING 417/517 — Endangered Languages
Research Interests
- Linguistic Anthropology of Education
- Language Policy & Planning
- Commodification of Language
- Sociolinguistics of Tourism
- Ethnographic Research Methods
- Language Endangerment & Revitalization
Selected Publications
- Thorne, S. L., Hellermann, J., Hanks, D. H., Sydorenko, T., LeWarne, A., Martin-Long, C., & Wang, H. (forthcoming). “That’s worth investigating”: Toward conversational human-generative AI interaction. Language Teaching Research.
- Hanks, D. H. (forthcoming). Eat, pray, love, speak: The commodification of language education for tourism in Bali [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Pennsylvania.
- Hornberger, N. H., Anzures Tapia, A., Hanks, D. H., Kvietok Dueñas, F., & Lee, S. (2018). Ethnography of language planning and policy. Language Teaching, 51(2), 152–186. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444817000428
- Hanks, D. H. (2017). Policy barriers to Ainu language revitalization in Japan: When globalization means English. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 32(1), 91–110. https://wpel.gse.upenn.edu/s2017#hanks