Ika is an Education Focused academic and Head of the School of Culture and Communication. She has taught in Cultural Studies, English Literature, and Classics programs. She designed and convened the Master of Arts in Reception & Critical Theory at the University of Bristol from 2007-2011.
She taught at the University of Wollongong from 2013-2020, when she took on a leadership position as Associate Dean (Education) and oversaw the transition to emergency online learning. She is interested in questions of literature and interpretation, and is currently writing a chapter on student refusals to read for the Routledge Companion to Dangerous Books. She has published in The Conversation on trigger warnings in the classroom and on not-reading as a mode of reading.