Professor Beatrice Szczepek Reed
Head of School of Social Sciences, Professor of Linguistics and English LanguageResearch Overview
I am a linguist working within the analytical frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics. Within those, my interests are in the sound patterns of language (phonetics, phonology) and their contributions to social meaning-making. I am also interested in how conversationalists respond to new information, how they teach and learn embodied skills, and how humans interact vocally with other animals.
Profile
Beatrice Szczepek Reed joined Lancaster University as Professor of Linguistics in 2025. She is currently Head of the School of Social Sciences. Previously, she has been Head of the School of Education, Communication and Society at King's College London and Head of the Department of Education at the University of York. She has also worked at the University of Nottingham and the University of Konstanz, Germany.
Beatrice is interested in how humans and other animals create meaning in social interaction. Her main focus is on the use of the voice (prosody, articulation) and how it interacts with other linguistic and embodied devices. She is currently working on vocal human-animal interaction, on responses to news in conversation, and on applying findings from interaction research to actor voice training.
PhD Supervision Interests
I am keen to supervise PhD projects in the areas of naturally-occurring interaction, prosody in interaction, and human-animal interaction.