Niall Curry FRSA, FGCA, SFHEA

• PhD in Linguistics, University of Limerick, Ireland, 2020
• Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Professional Practice, Coventry University, UK, 2020
• MA in TESOL, University of Limerick, Ireland, 2015
• BA (Hons) in Applied Languages, University of Limerick, Ireland, 2013

Niall is an applied linguist whose work spans a range of areas including corpus linguistics, contrastive linguistics, discourse analysis, and language pedagogy. Their research addresses global issues, including AI, climate change, education, health, and science communication.

Niall completed their PhD at the University of Limerick (Ireland), during which time they also worked as a Senior Research Manager at Cambridge University Press. In that role, they channelled research into practice by using and conducting research to inform the development of educational materials and resources for language learning on the global stage. In 2020, they moved to Coventry University, where they worked as Assistant Professor before joining the School of English at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2023, where they were Reader in Languages and Linguistics and Co-Lead of the Manchester Centre for Research in Linguistics. They joined University of Birmingham in 2026 as a 125th Anniversary Fellow and Associate Professor of Languages and Linguistics.

Niall is Co-Editor of the Routledge Applied Corpus Linguistics and Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides book series, Section Editor of the Elsevier International Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, and Associate Editor of the journal, Language Learning and Technology. They are also a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Royal Society for Arts, Associate Fellow of the Global China Academy, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Géras International Correspondent. 

Niall is an External Examiner at the University of Sussex (UK) and previously held this position at Mary Immaculate College (Ireland). They were also a Visiting Professor at Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro” (Italy) in 2023, and at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil) in 2026.

Find more information on our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics page about doctoral research at University of Birmingham.

Niall's current work centres on issues related to AI, climate change, science communication, and language pedagogy across languages, cultures, and contexts. They use a range of methods to support this work, drawing to approaches to corpus and contrastive linguistics analysis, discourse and metadiscourse studies, genre and register analysis, focus-group, interview, and survey analysis, function-to-form and pragmatic analyses, and critical grounded theory. 

Niall is a PI on the “Developing disciplinarily situated recommendations for responsible GenAI use in the Social Sciences” project – GenAI in the Disciplines, in short. This project is funded by UKRI Metascience and takes a critical perspective on AI use across the social sciences with a view to developing discipline-specific guidelines for evaluating the use of AI in the research process. The project focuses on a number of areas in the Social Sciences, including Business and Economics, Education, and Linguistics, and takes a bottom-up and participatory approach, bringing together different disciplinary voices to shape the future of AI use (or non-use) in the social sciences. Their additional Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Post-doctoral Fellowship offers and international and cross-sectional perspective to this work, investigating GenAI use by learners, teachers, and researchers in the Japanese context.

In the context of climate change, Niall's work has addressed issues in science communication and public-oriented research communication, across languages, disciplines, and contexts, and has shed light on the culturally and epistemologically situated nature of science. Through this activity, Niall has established, among other things, the registral features of forms of public-oriented research communication, identified cultural differences in the representation of climate science in English, French, and Spanish, and highlighted interdiscursive tendencies of science communication to reflect linguistic characteristics of news media. 

Niall's work in language pedagogy centres on issues of AI, data-driven learning, English-medium instruction, writing pedagogies, materials development, and assessment development, all typically (though not exclusively) through a corpus linguistics lens. Through this work, they have set research agenda for the field, interrogated the use of AI in language education, focusing on issues of personalisation and AI literacy, and advanced participatory approaches to materials and assessment development, through collaborative work with teachers, publishers, and assessment and governmental bodies. 

Niall has been Principal Investigator (PI) and Co-Investigator (Co-I) on a number of research projects, funded by UKRI, the King Sejong Institute Foundation, the Institute of Coding, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Spanish Ministry for Science, Innovation and Universities, and the Cambridge Funded Research Programme. Below, you can find out more about the projects led by Niall as PI, and those to which they have contributed as Co-I.

Current and completed projects as PI

•    2025 – 2027 |  Developing disciplinarily situated recommendations for responsible GenAI use in the Social Sciences | UKRI Metascience AI Fellowship
•    2026 – 2027 | An investigation of GenAI use by learners, teachers, and researchers in the Japanese context | Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Post-doctoral Fellowship 
•    2021 – 2023 |  Evaluating the Representation of Spoken Language in ELT Materials | Cambridge University Press and Assessment Funded Research Programme
•    2021| Opportunities and Barriers for Social and Engaged Learning in Digital Pedagogies: Towards Research Informed Guidelines | Institute of Coding Trends in Digital Skills

Current and completed projects as Co-I

•    2026 – 2028 | Framing digital trust: discursive mechanisms in expert knowledge dissemination | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
•    2026 – 2028 | Ten years of the climate debate in Poland: Analysis of public discourse using large language models (2015-2025) | Narodowe Centrum Nauki
•    2024 – 2028 | Broadening the Scope of Data-driven Learning: A Multi-site and Multi-data Approach | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
•    2024 – 2025 |  A Study for Mapping International Language Achievement Standards for the 2024 Sejong Korean language Assessment (SKA) | |The King Sejong Institute Foundation 
•    2023 – 2024 |  A Study for Mapping International Language Achievement Standards for the 2023 Sejong Korean Assessment (SKA) | The King Sejong Institute Foundation 
•    2022 – 2023 |  Meeting Future Challenges in Language Testing and Teaching: Building Teams, Setting Goals | UKRI UK-South Korea Collaborative Research and Development Fund 
•    2019 – 2020 | Identificación y Análisis De Las Estrategias Metadiscursivas En Artículos Científicos En Español E Ingles | Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades