Cori Jakubiak
On leave in 2024-25
Director, Center for Prairie Studies
As Director of the Center for Prairie Studies, Cori works closely with the Center for Prairie Studies Advisory Board to create opportunities for the campus and wider community to learn about, engage with, and celebrate Central Iowa's tallgrass prairie region. She teaches a course on place-based education, and her most recent first-year tutorial, Zoopolis, focused on human-animal relations through critical animal studies and ecojustice perspectives.
Cori's scholarship, broadly defined, examines the intersections among language education, touristic mobilities, and language ideologies. Her 2023 co-edited book, Voluntourism and Language Teaching/Learning: Critical Perspectives (with Larissa Semiramis Schedel), explores how various forms of volunteer teaching/learning mobility, such as volunteer English language teaching abroad and low-wage gap year labor, commodify language learning and propagate powerful ideas about languages and their speakers. Branching off from this work, Cori's current research project examines language tourism in Italy.
Education and Degrees
B.A. Ed., The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 1994, English major, history minor
M.A., Eastern Michigan University, 2001
TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages)
Ph. D., The University of Georgia, 2011, in Language & Literacy Education
Professional Teaching Credentials
Georgia Educator Certificate
State of Michigan Professional Education Certificate
Certification Endorsements:
- English Language Arts & English Literature (grades 5-12)
- English as a Second Language (ESL) (grades P-12)
- History (grades 5-12)
- Japanese Language and Culture (grades 5-12)
- Middle school specialization (grades 5-8)