Research Overview

I am a Reader in Linguistics and UKRI Future Leader Fellow with an interest in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and health communication.

My current project, 'Public Discourses of Dementia: Challenging Stigma and Promoting Personhood' (funded £1 million by UKRI), examines linguistic and visual representations of dementia across a range of public contexts.

In 2023, I was awarded a Fulbright All Disciplines Award. As a result of this, in 2024 I will be based in Northern Arizona University, where I will carry out research on representations of dementia in US media.

I am Associate Editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins).

I am Co-Editor of the Corpus and Discourse book series (Bloomsbury, with Michaela Mahlberg).

I am Co-Editor of the Cambridge Elements series, Critical Discourse Studies(Cambridge University Press, with Veronika Koller).

I am a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

I am a member of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant Assessment Panel.

I am a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Advisory Board.

I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.

I am a member of the Expert Review College for Research Foundation - Flanders.

I am a member of the Executive Committee of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL).

I am the Convenor of BAAL's Corpus Linguistics Special Interest Group.

I am a member of the Executive Committee of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME).

I serve on the Editorial Boards of the following journals: Applied Corpus Linguistics, Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines, Discourse & Society, Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine, Journal of Corpus Approaches to Chinese Social Science, Languages, Texts and Society, Research in Corpus Linguistics, Qualitative Health Communication, Social Semiotics.