Staff in Linguistics and Communication

I am a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Communication. I have a background in teaching English in England and Italy.

I am an Assistant Professor in Digital Media and Communications, specialising in Digital Journalism. My research focuses on knowledge production in digital journalism, participatory journalism, community media, and interactive storytelling. 

Dr Bettina Bódi is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media. Her research specialisms are digital media and videogames, with a focus on agency. Her teaching focuses on game studies, social media, television studies, and cultural studies.

Peter is a sociolinguist with a background in English language teaching and teacher education who works at the intersections of Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and TESOL. He has carried out research and taught in a number of HE contexts both in the UK and abroad and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

I am a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Linguistics and Communication. My research incorporates corpus linguistic methodology and is primarily concerned with irony, humour and language creativity.

I am a senior lecturer in psycholinguistics, with a particular interest in idiomatic and formulaic language in native and non-native speakers.

I am a postdoctoral research fellow on the ESRC-funded Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People project led by Dr Ruth Page in collaboration with Dr Michael Larkin (Aston University) and Professor Paul Crawford (University of Nottingham). My current focus within the role is on identifying and categorising the influencer representation of mental health on social media.

As a ...

My main research interest is in understanding how our cognitive capacities give rise to the patterns we see in language and how language learners might use these patterns to build up knowledge of their language. I work with the Out Of Our Minds team to understand language knowledge and optimize language learning and am Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cognitive Linguistics.

I have a background in English language teaching. My main research interest is in the interface between language teaching and corpus linguistics.

I am a postdoctoral research fellow with Prof. Jeannette Littlemore on the AHRC-funded Young People, Criticality and Metaphor project led by Professor Alice Deignan (University of Leeds) in collaboration with Professor Jeannette Littlemore (Birmingham University) and Professor Elena Semino (Lancaster University). The project will investigate children’s (aged 9-13) ...

Samantha has worked as a Research Assistant for the EMMA project since 2018 alongside Professor Jeannette Littlemore, Dr Paula Pérez-Sobrino, and Dr David Houghton that explores multimodal metaphor in advertising. The EMMA project investigates how multimodal metaphor is used creatively in advertising across the world and involves collaborations with international advertising agencies to ...

My work combines corpus linguistic and experimental methods with discourse analysis to study the linguistic factors at the heart of important societal issues such as trust, polarization and climate change.

I am a lecturer in corpus-based sociolinguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Communication. My research focuses on the quantitative analysis of grammatical variation.

My research focuses on understanding language variation and change through the quantitative analysis of large corpora of natural language data.

I am a corpus linguist. The main focus of my work is on using computers to study latent patterning in very large collections of naturally occurring language data.

Gregory Hadley received his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham (UK), where his primary focus was in the Sociology of English Language Teaching. A Professor of Sociolinguistics and Western Cultural Studies at Niigata University, Japan, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, he is also the author of English for Academic Purposes in Neoliberal Universities: A ...

I am a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham. I have a background in English Language teaching, teacher-training and language education project management.

Dr Jing Huang is a sociolinguist researching identification, multilingualism, and cross-cultural communication in society. Her teaching covers multiple areas in sociolinguistics, language education, and interpretivist methodologies.

I have a background in English Language and Applied Linguistics and have worked in three countries. I enjoy research and teaching at all levels and I especially like supervising Doctoral Researchers.

I am a Professor of English Language in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham. I teach a range of modules at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and supervise PhD students in Linguistics and Communication. My research focusses on self-representation and identity in academic texts. I am also interested in writing development across ...

Dr Alexander Laffer is a lecturer and research and editorial consultant. His academic research combines discourse analysis and literary linguistics and he is currently exploring the interaction between digital fiction and empathy. He has taught modules in digital media discourse, professional communication, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. He has received Santander Universities funding to ...

Jeannette Littlemore is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the role played by metaphor and metonymy in the understanding and expression of emotional experiences. She also explores the role played by metaphor and metonymy in language learning and cross-cultural communication. 

Her ...

I’m a post-doctoral researcher working in the Making Numbers Meaningful project led by Bodo Winter.

I’m interested in how people use language to create and manage meaning in communication, both when interacting with others and when producing and interpreting language in various other settings. In my research I use primarily quantitative empirical methods, including controlled ...

As a corpus linguist, I am interested in language as a social phenomenon and the way in which we use language to understand and shape the world we live in. A large part of my research focuses on the language of Dickens’s fiction, literary linguistics, and discourse analysis.

I am currently Principal Investigator on the AHRC funded CLiC Dickens project.

I speak about Corpus ...

I work in the Department of Linguistics and Communication where I am responsible for teaching and administration on the MAs in TEFL/TESL and Applied Linguistics.

Joanne McCuaig is a Doctoral Researcher investigating the language use of purportedly co-opted medical terminology from psychology. She uses corpus linguistics and discourse analysis for her interdisciplinary research.

• Doctoral researcher profile

I collaborate with the deaf community in Guinea-Bissau (West Africa). I did my PhD work on three West African sign languages, two used by micro-communities – Adamorobe Sign Language (Ghana) with about 250 years, and Langue des Signes de Bouakako (Ivory Coast) with about 50 years, and one by a macro-community, Língua Gestual Guineense (Guinea-Bissau) with about 20 years. I compared ...

My applied linguistics research spans two areas, second language acquisition (SLA) and corpus linguistics. I am trying to bring the two areas together so that developmental research in SLA can benefit from large-scale corpus data.

I am an Associate Professor interested in the acquisition and emergence of manual communication. I specialise in the acquisition of a sign language as a first and second language, sign language processing, and the similarities between sign and gesture. I also explore the role of gesture and iconicity in sign language emergence and evolution.

Ruth Page is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the language that people use when the communicate in social media, with a focus on storytelling. She has published studies that cover a range of mediated forms, including blogs, social network sites and video-sharing platforms. Her ...

I am an Associate Professor in Historical Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Communication. I am also the Head of Education for the School of EDACS.

I am a cognitive linguist, a quantitative corpus linguist, and a construction grammarian. I teach classes on topics surrounding the grammar and semantics of English.

I am an Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics. My research examines iconicity in speech and gesture, with special interest in the evolution of human communication. I also study the gesturing and vocal behaviour of great apes.

Corpus Linguistics, EAP and the linguistics of epistemology.

I am a sign language linguist, focussing on British Sign Language (BSL). I am working part-time on the SignMorph project, using both the BSL Corpus and experimental methods to investigate the morphology of BSL.  In addition, I am completing a PhD at the Deafness, Cognition and Language (DCAL) Research Centre, University College London, examining the structure of noun phrases within BSL.

I am an experienced higher education lecturer and third sector project coordinator with an interest in social movement communication and grassroots storytelling. My main areas of research include the political and social role of digital, new and legacy media and I specialise in content and discourse analysis in the digital environment.

I am a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham.  I teach modules on sociolinguistics, language and gesture, and linguistic diversity. My research focuses on the linguistics of sign languages, especially Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and British Sign Language (BSL).

I have joined Birmingham University in September 2015, and am teaching MA modules on campus. I am also responsible for Distance Learning modules and DL tutors. My research interests lie in bi- and multilingualism, psycholinguistics and in application of these to TESOL.

I teach on a number of the department’s programmes. I research relations between language, communication and politics, using approaches from discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and archival research. My current research looks at issues to do with the simplicity, informality and clarity of political language, in Britain especially.

I have been at the University of Birmingham since September 2009, and I am the Acting Head of Department of Linguistics and Communications (till 31^st August 2024) as well as being Director of the Centre for Corpus Research. I am an applied corpus linguist with particular interest in specialised discourses. I am also an Editor-in-Chief of the Applied Corpus Linguistics journal.

My research focuses on autistic communication, taking a neurodiverse and linguistic approach. I centre autistic participants and experiences in my research and am autistic myself. My work aims to understand authentic autistic communication to educate neurotypical populations and increase autism acceptance. My research methods include digital ethnography, discourse analysis, computer-mediated ...

I am a lecturer working in the Department of Linguistics and Communication. I work with both undergraduate and postgraduate students who are following our campus and distance programmes. My main areas of expertise are associated with language teaching and corpus linguistics. 

I am a Professor of Linguistics and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow. My research uses data science-driven linguistics to study multimodal communication, including iconicity, gesture and metaphor. For my Future Leaders Fellowship, I investigate how people communicate numerical information across different communication channels. 

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I work in the area of Critical Discourse Analysis and am the co-editor of Gender and Language, Equinox.

I started my teaching career as a volunteer in Nigeria, followed by several ELT jobs in Africa and South-East Asia, before joining Birmingham to set up ELT teacher development and applied linguistics programmes.

Now increasingly retired, I gradually move away from corpus linguistics into discourse analysis, from a hermeneutic and neo-pragmatic perspective, believing that the social and natural world we encounter is constituted by the discourse in which we take part.