Dr Ruth Page

Photograph of Dr Ruth Page

Department of English Language and Linguistics
Reader in Stylistics
Student Experience Academic Lead for ELAL

Contact details

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

I am a Reader in Stylistics. My main research explores the language people use when they tell stories, particularly in social media contexts.

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 both the campus-based and the distance MA programmes in Literary Linguistics and Applied Linguistics as well as the BA Single Honours and Joint Honours Programmes in English Language. I teach on and/or convene modules in Language, Gender and Identity, Narrative Analysis and Literary Linguistics.

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

My research interests focus on narrative analysis, computer-mediated communication and language and gender.  My research includes both literary-critical and discourse analytic approaches to narrative, exploring storytelling examples found in literary, conversational, and most recently, social media contexts.  I enjoy working with commercial and heritage partners on funded and unfunded collaborations.

Other activities

  • I was Principal Investigator for the AHRC Research Network: Transforming Thresholds
  • I am Editor of Discourse, Context & Media
  • I convene BAAL’s Special Interest Group for Language and New Media

Publications

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

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