Priya Ananth received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Literatures from The Ohio State University in 2007. She taught at Hamilton College for one year as a visiting Assistant Professor. In 2008, she joined Middle Tennessee State University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Japanese program. She has taught all levels of Japanese and courses on Japanese business culture and applied linguistics. She designed new undergraduate courses such as JAPN 3015 Business Japanese, JAPN 3570 Introduction to Japanese Linguistics, and HUM 3000 Special Topics in Foreign Language Linguistics: Language Contact in Japan. She has been instrumental in creating a new Foreign Languages/Japanese major that will become available in August 2014. This is in addition to a Japanese Language minor that she created in 2009. She has been tenured and promoted to Associate Professor, effective August 2014.
Her recent publications include, “Assessing Written Skills in Research Paper Projects” in Practical Assessment Tools For College Japanese, NFLRC (2013); “Time Matters in Japanese Teaching Materials” in The Journal of Canadian Association of Japanese Language Education (2012); and “Form-Meaning Associations in Japanese – Analysis of Native and Non-Native Corpus Data” in Kyoto University Linguistic Journal (2011).