Hyejoo Back is Associate Professor of the Practice in East Asian Studies and Korean Language and the Co-Curricular Coordinator. She recently finished two grant projects (Five College Innovative Language Teaching Grants as a part of the Mellon Foundation Grant) on Korean pre-modern history and Korean modern history for advanced Korean learners. Her research and teaching interests include content-based instruction of language with a focus on history and culture, pedagogy in language teaching, motivation, curriculum and instruction, and testing and measurement. She is currently working on a book on Korean culture for advanced Korean learners.

She received her Ph.D. in Instructional Psychology for Science Teaching from the University at Albany, State University of New York. She has been teaching and developing the Korean curriculum for all levels at Wesleyan. Before coming to Wesleyan, she had been teaching courses on Educational Psychology, Instructional Media, and Special Education at the graduate school at Quinnipiac University. She also taught the same curriculum at both the undergraduate and graduate level at the University of Hartford.