Professor Ruth Page

Department of Linguistics and Communication
Professor of Applied Linguistics
Program Director, BA Digital Media and Communications

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)121 415 8020
Email: r.e.page@bham.ac.uk
Twitter: @ruthtweetpage

View my research portal

Address: Frankland Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Ruth Page is a Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Communication at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the language that people use when they 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).

Qualifications

BA English Literature and Language (1994)
Certificate in Professional Development, University of Central England (1997)
PhD (University of Birmingham, 2000)

Biography

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.

Teaching

I teach on our undergraduate and MA programmes, including the BA Digital Media and Communications and the BA English Language and Linguistics. I teach on and/or convene modules in Narrative Analysis, Language and New Media and employer-led modules, such as Media in the Workplace.

Postgraduate supervision

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.

Research

Ruth’s research explores how people communicate in social media contexts, with a particular focus on storytelling. She is the Principal Investigator for the ESRC funded project, Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People (2024-2026). She was the Supervisor for the EU Funded project, Blame Avoidance in Twitter (2020-2022).

Other activities

I was Editor of Discourse, Context & Media (2015-2019)
I convened BAAL’s Special Interest Group for Language and New Media (2013-2018)