Staff in English Language and Linguistics

We have been at the forefront of research in English Language and Linguistics for over fifty years and we continue to make cutting-edge contributions to the field.

Full list of Academic Staff in English Language and Applied Linguistics

Lorraine Adriano

Lorraine Adriano

Teaching Fellow

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

Dr Peter Browning

Dr Peter Browning

Teaching Fellow

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.

David Callaghan

David Callaghan

Teaching Fellow

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

Dr Gareth Carrol

Dr Gareth Carrol

Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics

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

Dr Alex Christiansen

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

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 ...

Professor Dagmar Divjak

Professor Dagmar Divjak

Professorial Research Fellow in Cognitive Linguistics and Language Cognition

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.

David Evans

Teaching Fellow

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

Natalie Finlayson

Natalie Finlayson

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I am a postdoctoral research fellow on the Reading Concordances in the 21st Century (RC21) project led by Michaela Mahlberg in collaboration with Stephanie Evert (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg). In this role, I am currently leading on the development of a systematic account of strategies used by corpus linguists to organise and analyse concordances.

I am interested ...

Ms Samantha Ford

Ms Samantha Ford

Research Assistant

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 projectinvestigates how multimodal metaphor is used creatively in advertising across the world and involves collaborations with international advertising agencies to ...

Dr Matteo Fuoli

Dr Matteo Fuoli

Associate Professor of Corpus-based Discourse Analysis
International Exchange Tutor

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.

Dr Jason Grafmiller

Dr Jason Grafmiller

Lecturer in corpus-based sociolinguistics

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

Professor Jack Grieve

Professor Jack Grieve

Professor of Corpus Linguistics

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

Dr Nicholas Groom

Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics

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.

Dr Gregory Hadley

Dr Gregory Hadley

Teaching Fellow

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 ...

Robert Holland

Lecturer in Applied Linguistics

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

Dr Jing Huang

Dr Jing Huang

Lecturer in TESOL

I am a Lecturer in TESOL. I teach several core and optional modules of the MA Applied Linguistics and MA TESOL programmes. My research focuses on using ethnographic methods combined with secondary data analysis to research sociolinguistic practices of individuals, families, schools, and communities.

Professor Susan Hunston

Professor Susan Hunston

Professor of English Language

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.

Professor Suganthi John

Professor Suganthi John

Professor of English Language
Deputy Director of Education (Distance and Digital Education)

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

Dr Alexander Laffer

Teaching Fellow

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 ...

Professor Jeannette Littlemore

Professor Jeannette Littlemore

Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics

Jeannette Littlemore is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics 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 ...

Hannah Lutzenberger

Hannah Lutzenberger

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

I am a postdoctoral research fellow on the SignMorph project in which I will focus on studying Kata Kolok, a sign language used in a Balinese village. My research interests cover language documentation, language variation, and language acquisition.

Dr Vinicius Macuch Silva

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

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 ...

Professor Michaela Mahlberg

Professor Michaela Mahlberg

Chair in Corpus Linguistics
Co-Director, Centre for Corpus Research

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 ...

Joanne McCuaig

Joanne McCuaig

Teaching Fellow

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.

Dr Marta Morgado

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

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 ...

Dr Akira Murakami

Dr Akira Murakami

Birmingham Fellow

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.

Dr Gerardo Ortega

Dr Gerardo Ortega

Associate Professor

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.

Dr Ruth Page

Dr Ruth Page

Reader in Applied Linguistics
Program Director, BA Digital Media and Communications

Ruth Page is a Reader in Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics 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 books ...

Dr Amanda Patten

Dr Amanda Patten

Associate Professor in Historical Linguistics
Head of Education for the School of EDACS

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

Dr Florent Perek

Dr Florent Perek

Associate Professor in Cognitive Linguistics
Deputy Director of the Centre for Corpus Research

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.

Dr Marcus Perlman

Dr Marcus Perlman

Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics
Acting Director of PGR for ELAL

I am a lecturer 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.

Dr Garry Plappert

Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics

Corpus Linguistics, EAP and the linguistics of epistemology.

Heidi Proctor

Heidi Proctor

Research Fellow

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.

Dr Abi Rhodes

Dr Abi Rhodes

Assistant Professor in Language and Communication

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.

Professor Adam Schembri

Professor Adam Schembri

Professor of Linguistics

I am a Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Language and Linguistics 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).

Dr Petra Schoofs

Dr Petra Schoofs

Lecturer in TESOL

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.

Dr Joe Spencer-Bennett

Dr Joe Spencer-Bennett

Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics

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.

Dr Paul Thompson

Dr Paul Thompson

Reader in Applied Corpus Linguistics
Head of English Language and Linguistics
Co-Director, Centre for Corpus Research

I have been at the University of Birmingham since September 2009, and I am the Head of Department for English Language and Linguistics as well as being Co-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.