Rate My Professor Eldin Milak

Dr. Eldin Milak is a Lecturer at Curtin University in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry within the Faculty of Humanities, where he serves as Korean Studies Major Coordinator and AKS Core Grant Lecturer. He earned his PhD in Linguistics from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea (2019–2023), as a Global Korea Scholar (GKS) and research lead for the government-funded Brain Korea 21 (BK21) project. Previously, he completed linguistics studies at Montclair State University (2015–2016, non-degree MA program) and International Burch University (2014–2015), and worked as a Research Assistant in the Department of English Language and Literature at International Burch University (2014–2018). Milak has held prestigious fellowships, including the 2023 Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research in Australia and New Zealand, Fulbright Visiting Scholar award, and Korean Government Scholarship Program (KGSP) for his doctoral studies.

Milak's research focuses on sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and social semiotics, examining honorifics, kinship terms, teknonymy, geononymy, politeness, script practices, and their impacts on personal and social identities in South Korea and the Balkans. His interests include translingual practices of youth, AI accent modification tools, racial blindness in sociolinguistic arenas, urban semiotics of Koreanness in Western Australia, masks as semiotic devices, and names in the subjectivization of Korean women. He has published in leading journals such as Discourse, Context and Media, Language and Communication, and Applied Linguistics. Notable works include the co-edited volume Becoming a Linguist: Advice from Key Thinkers in Language Studies (Routledge, 2024), featuring contributions from Noam Chomsky; “Call me by my name”: Names, address, and the subjectivization of Korean women (2022); Translingual online identities in the global South: The construction of local ‘gang cultures’ in the social media spaces of Balkan and South Korean artists (2022); Meeting standards: (Re)colonial and subversive potential of AI modification (2024, First Runner-Up award); and Between play and precarity: translingual practices of youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2025). Milak moderates theory reading groups and podcasts on sociolinguistics, contributing to mentorship for linguists from the Global South.