PhD Supervision Interests

My research is concerned with the interaction between structured social relations, people’s goals and interests, and the part played by discursive patterns in sustaining or challenging these. I welcome applications that propose to explore such relationships, including those using corpus-assisted approaches. Currently, I am the co-investigator on a project that is researching the discursive representation of animals (see http://animaldiscourse.wordpress.com/), and supervising two PhD students working on related topics, and would be interested in further proposals in this area. My interest in how people talk and write about non-human animals arises from a more general concern with the links between language use and social relationships and processes. I am also collaborating with a political scientist on research into parliamentary language, and would welcome PhD proposals in related areas.