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.

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.