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My undergraduate degree was a four-year MA in English Language and Literature from Edinburgh University; from there I went to St John’s College, Oxford, and completed a DPhil on William Faulkner’s style. Then for six years I taught at the National University of Singapore, followed by nine years, latterly with tenure, at the University of Washington, Seattle.

I came to the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡  in 1996, attracted by the lively community of English language researchers working here.  I have long nurtured a secondary interest in law and the power of language in all kinds of legal proceedings, and this led me to complete the Graduate Diploma in Legal Studies in 2000.  

From 2002 to 2020 I was editor of the and have served as Chair of the .  In 2019 I completed a three-year term as Chair of the (pala.ac.uk). I am also quite involved in .  I retired from the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡ in 2020.

Professor Toolan is no longer accepting students for supervision.

My most recent research has been on how some of the UK news media have ‘normalized’ the increased wealth inequality that has harmed the UK in recent decades.  The research combines corpus linguistic and critical discourse analytical methods, and is the topic of my most recent book, The Language of Inequality in the News: A Discourse Analytic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2018).  In narrative studies, my corpus stylistic study of short-story narratives appeared in 2016 from Routledge: Making sense of narrative text: situation, repetition, and mental picturing.

• Editor of the Journal of Literary Semantics (de Gruyter) since 2002.
• Personal website: