Dr Ruth Page
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 include: Narratives online. Shared Stories and Social Media(Cambridge University Press, 2018), which won the 2020 Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies, and Stories and Social Media(Routledge, 2012).
- BA English Literature and Language (1994)
- Certificate in Professional Development, University of Central England (1997)
- PhD (University of Birmingham, 2000)
I joined the Department of English Language and Linguistics in 2015, returning to the University of Birmingham where I completed my undergraduate and doctoral studies some years earlier. In between, I worked at Birmingham City University and the University of Leicester.
I teach on our undergraduate and MA programmes, including the BA Digital Media and Communications and the BA English Language and Lingusitics. I teach on and/or convene modules in Narrative Analysis, Language and New Media and employer-led modules, such as Media in the Workplace.
I am always looking for students with exciting projects and am particularly interested in supervising projects which incorporate discourse analysis and narrative analysis, focus on data from spoken or social media contexts, which include multimodal materials along with verbal data, and/or explore topics in language and gender. I have supervised PhD projects in the broad fields of
Discourse analysis
Critical discourse analysis
Computer-mediated communication
Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.
- I was Editor of Discourse, Context & Media (2015-2019)
- I convened BAAL’s Special Interest Group for Language and New Media (2013-2018)
Recent publications
Book
Page, R 2018, Narratives online: shared stories in social media. Cambridge University Press. <https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/languages-linguistics/english-language-and-linguistics-general-interest/narratives-online-shared-stories-social-media?format=HB>
Article
Page, R & Hansson, S 2024, 'Dialogic analysis of government social media communication: How commanding and thanking elicit blame', Discourse, Context and Media, vol. 57, 100757. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2024.100757
Hansson, S, Fuoli, M & Page, R 2023, 'Strategies of Blaming on Social Media: An Experimental Study of Linguistic Framing and Retweetability', Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/00936502231211363
Hansson, S & Page, R 2022, 'Corpus-assisted analysis of legitimation strategies in government social media communication', Discourse and Communication, vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813221099202
Hansson, S, Page, R & Fuoli, M 2022, 'Discursive strategies of blaming: the language of judgment and political protest online', Social Media + Society, pp. 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221138753
Hansson, S & Page, R 2022, 'Legitimation in government social media communication: the case of the Brexit department', Critical Discourse Studies, pp. 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2022.2058971
Page, R 2019, 'Group selfies and Snapchat: from sociality to synthetic collectivisation', Discourse, Context and Media, vol. 28, pp. 79-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2018.10.003
Page, R 2019, 'Self-denigration and the mixed messages of 'ugly' selfies in Instagram', Internet Pragmatics, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 173-205. https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00035.pag
Page, R 2017, 'Ethics Revisited: Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships in Online Research', Applied Linguistics Review , vol. 8, no. 2-3, pp. 315-320. https://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2016-1043
Page, R 2014, 'Counter narratives and controversial crimes: The Wikipedia article for the ‘Murder of Meredith Kercher’', Language and Literature, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 61-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947013510648
Page, R 2014, 'Saying ‘Sorry’: Corporate Apologies Posted to Twitter', Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 62, pp. 30-45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.12.003
Chapter
Page, R 2017, Narration. in C Hoffmann & W Bublitz (eds), Handbook of Pragmatics 11: Pragmatics of Social Media. De Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 523-544. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110431070
Page, R 2015, The Narrative Dimensions of Social Media Storytelling: Options for Linearity and Tellership. in A De Fina & A Georgakopoulou (eds), The Blackwell Handbook of Narrative Analysis. Blackwell handbooks in linguistics, Blackwell-Wiley, Oxford, pp. 329-448.
Page, R 2014, Hoaxes, Hacking and Humour: Analysing Impersonated Identity Online. in P Sargeant & C Tagg (eds), The Language of Social Media: Communication and Community on the Internet.. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 46.
View all publications in research portal