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, challenged and maintained. I have done extensive research on business communication, including on corporate social responsibility, crisis communication and webcare. I am currently working on project funded by the Institute for Global Innovation which focuses on ideological polarization on social media. The project combines corpus and experimental methods to examine the linguistic factors that drive people apart when interacting online.

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.