Thomas Ricento is Professor and Research Chair at the University of Calgary, Canada. He has published widely in the field of language policy and on the politics of language in North America. He was a Fulbright Professor in Colombia (1989) and Costa Rica (2000), and a visiting professor at universities in Chile, Germany, Spain, , and Switzerland. He was Director of English Language Programs at the Japan Center for Michigan Universities, Hikone, Japan from 1989-1991.
Tom Ricento and the stellar cast of scholars he has assembled in this book achieve something extraordinary: they construct a story that people will still have to read decades later, on an object characterized paradoxically by extremely rapid and radical change. It is an intellectual and academic 'tour de force' which focuses on mechanisms and structures rather than on phenomena and anecdotes, and so easily transcends the level of here-and-now documentation. --Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University In an era where language change and loss is often explained by reference to inevitable forces of 'culture' and 'globalization, ' this important book brings us back home to core questions of economic power and political control. --Allan Luke, Queensland University of Technology Language Policy and Political Economy is both timely and important, engaging with the debates that are central to current language policy research. I don't think anyone will be able to write about 'global English' again without seriously engaging with the analyses in this book. --James Tollefson, The University of Hong Kong