Junko Baba received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Her teaching and research includes cross-cultural studies between Japanese and American culture and on how Japanese culture affects language in communications, literature, theater, and media art.  Dr. Baba's research has been interdisciplinary in nature, developed from her primary research area in socio-pragmatics (language use in society/culture) and from secondary training in literature during her graduate studies. She has also applied her research to pedagogy and Second Language Acquisition (SLA).

Most recently she has done research into expressions of linguistic affect in socio-pragmatics, including Japanese case marker elision and mimetics and has developed a grammar-pragmatics interface model involving Japanese case marker elision. In her secondary research area, she investigated within a sociopolitical context the semiotics of food in Japanese modern literature about WWII . Currently, she is exploring the effects of Japanese cinematic techniques on mimetics in story manga.

Dr. Baba teaches courses in Japanese culture, including film, animation, theater, literature and socio-linguistics, as well as Japanese language courses.