Hi! I'm Rika Ito, and I teach in the Asian Studies Department at St. Olaf College. My background is in Linguistics—I earned my Ph.D. from Michigan State University—and my courses cover everything from beginning Japanese to linguistics courses examining the role of language in society concerning power and privilege. This summer, I was also a visiting instructor for Columbia University's MA program in Japanese Pedagogy, where I taught a course on sociolinguistics.

My research area is sociolinguistics. I study how language is used in different social situations, and what that tells us about culture, power, and identity. Many of my recent work looks at how TV dramas and anime portray language. It's fascinating to see how these popular shows often reproduce certain language ideologies, like the dominance of English in Japan or the use of gender-linked expressions to construct character portrayals. I'm a strong believer in collaborative research, and I'm proud to have co-authored two publications with students (Ito & Bisila, 2020; Gilbert & Ito, 2020). 

Recently, my research has focused on the representation of the Ainu language, the indigenous language of northern Japan, in the popular anime Golden Kamuy. I've analyzed how the show uses a concept of "edutainment" to portray the Ainu, and my latest work (Ito, 2024) critically examines how the series, while not portraying Ainu characters negatively, can still perpetuate certain colonial narratives. This project is part of a larger collaboration with my colleague Professor Christina Spiker (Art/Art History and Asian Studies), and we're currently writing a manuscript for a journal after a great research trip to Ainu-themed museums in the summer of 2023.

I love being part of the academic community as an Editorial Board Member for the journal Language & Communication. I also serve as a reviewer for various scholarly journals and the American Association of Teachers of Japanese (AATJ) conference abstracts. It was a privilege to give the 42nd Melby Lecture last year about my teaching and research. You can find a list of all my publications on my ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9775-3858. Ultimately, my work is driven by the unique opportunity to combine my interests as a sociolinguistic scholar with my passion for teaching Japanese at a liberal arts college.

Away from campus, I'm usually outside gardening or inside having fun with my new kitten, Mia-chan.