Student Spotlight – Raechel Kundart

STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Meet Raechel, a second-year Asian Languages & Cultures MA student. Raechel graduated from UW in 2021 with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Linguistics, Japanese, and Asian Languages & Cultures and has returned to UW to further her studies. Her research interests are how transgender and gender non-conforming people navigate the explicitly gendered aspects of the Japanese language and how the pandemic impacted language learners’ social networks. Raechel is a FLAS Fellow for the 2024-2025 Academic Year and will continue to take advanced Japanese language classes next year. She also worked as the Japan Studies Program and East Asia Center’s Communications Student Assistant this past academic year. In addition to Japanese, Raechel is currently learning Mongolian and hopes to find a career where she can utilize both languages after graduating in June 2025.