Dr Alex Christiansen

Department of Linguistics and Communication
Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Contact details

Email
a.l.christiansen@bham.ac.uk
Address
Department of English Language and Linguistics
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

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 researcher, I have a particular interest in the development and deployment of novel corpus linguistic methodology for the purposes of solving real-world challenges, particularly those surrounding disinformation and online hate speech.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Applied Linguistics (University of Loughborough, 2023)
  • Fellow of Higher Education (FHEA) (AdvanceHE, 2023)
  • MA in Discourse Studies (Lancaster, 2018)
  • MA in English & Social Studies (Aalborg University, 2018)

Biography

I joined the Department of English Language and Linguistics in February 2024 as ESRC-funded Research Fellow. Though originally from Denmark, I moved to the UK in 2017 to complete a second concurrent MA programme at Lancaster University along my then-ongoing two-year MA at Aalborg University in Denmark. Since then, I have worked as an RA at Lancaster University, EAP at Nottingham University and adjunct lecturer at Loughborough University, where I also completed my PhD in Applied Linguistics in late 2023.

Teaching

I am an accredited Fellow of Higher Education and have experience teaching across nearly all aspects of HE in the UK and Denmark. Most recently, I led the development and delivery of a hybrid, full-time and part-time MSc module on Data Management and Ethics within Loughborough University’s School of Science

Research

For the past 5 years, my work has focused on large-scale analysis of online discourse, particularly disinformation and hate speech. To facilitate that interest, I spent my PhD developing novel methodologies for constructing, annotating and analysing large-scale multimodal discourse as it tends to appear on social media. The result is constituent analysis, an automated approach to analysing social media in its multimodal entirety while retaining both scale and context.