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• PhD in English Language and Linguistics, Lund University, Sweden, 2017
• MA in Language Sciences for Business, International Communication and Tourism, Università di Trento, Italy, 2011
• BA in Foreign Languages for Business and Tourism, Università di Trento, Italy, 2007

I joined the Department of English Language and Linguistics in Birmingham as a Lecturer in April 2017. Prior to this, I received my PhD in English Language and Linguistics from Lund University, in Sweden. My thesis focused on the phenomenon of trust from a discourse analytical and experimental perspective. Specifically, it examined how companies use language as a strategic tool to manage the trust of relevant audiences.

I currently teach two undergraduate modules in Discourse analysis and Business Discourse and Communication and supervise nine PhD students (three as the lead supervisor).

I would be happy to supervise research projects on the following topics:
• business discourse and communication: how companies use language to communicate with different audiences and accomplish important communicative goals
• polarization on social media: what are the linguistic factors that drive people apart online?
• experimental approaches to (critical) discourse analysis: using experiments to test hypotheses based on exploratory discourse analysis research
• trust from a linguistic perspective: how speakers use linguistic resources to build and repair trust in spoken and written interaction
• evaluative language: how speakers express emotions and opinions in discourse

Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics  page has information about doctoral research at the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡.

My research draws on an interdisciplinary mix of corpus, experimental and data science methods with discourse analysis to study the linguistic mechanisms at the heart of important social phenomena and issues, such as trust, polarization and climate change. I have helped establish trust as a new and promising avenue for research within linguistics. My work on this fundamental human phenomenon brings together linguistics and psychology to explore the question of how trust is created, maintained and challenged. I have done extensive research on business communication, including on corporate social responsibility, crisis communication and webcare. I am currently leading a UK Government funded project that investigates how language shapes trust, with a focus on deceptive and manipulative communication.

Memberships and Professional Activities

• 2023-present: Member of the advisory broad of the Cambridge Elements series in critical discourse studies.
• 2022-present: Member of the editorial board of the journal Discourse & Communication.
• 2021-present: Member of the editorial board of the Corpora and Discourse book series, Bloomsbury.
• 2020-present: Member of the editorial board of the journal Applied Corpus Linguistics.
• Regular refereeing for major international journals including: Applied Linguistics, Discourse & Society, Discourse & Communication, Discourse Studies, Discourse, Context & Media, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication. 

Institutional service

• 2020-2024: International Exchange Tutor for the School of English, Drama and Creative Studies.
• 2019-present: Elected member of the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡’s Academic Senate.
• 2020-2021: Staff-student Liaison, English Language and Linguistics Department.
• 2017-2020: Deputy Director of Undergraduate Programs, English Language and Linguistics Department.