PhDs
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We welcome applications for doctoral study from those with at least a 2:1 at undergraduate level and a strong Masters qualification.
You can find out about staff interests by viewing our individual (please click on the “staff” link above for these).
Our current students are working on the following topics:
- Jessi Frasier: Persuasion and identity in closing arguments in jury trials
- Erin Mathias: The recontextualisation of digital confession evidence in court
- Deborah Cabral: Trial discourse in Brazil
- Gifty Andoh Appiah: Communicating Forensic Sciences: Examining the language and communication of forensic evidence in Ghana’s criminal justice system
Our graduates completed thesis with the following titles with us. Links from their names show where they now work (where possible) and links from the thesis titles link to each thesis:
- Kate Barber: (Re)framing rape: A sociocognitive discourse analysis of sexual violence at the intersection of white and male supremacy (2022)
- Emily Powell: A corpus-based analysis of moral agency in pre-crime narratives (2022)
- Kate Steel: Positioning and power in police-victim interactions during first response call-outs at the scene of reported domestic abuse incidents
- David Griffin: Lexomancy: law and magic in the pseudolegal writings of the sovereign citizen movement (2022)
- Piotr Węgorowski: Between police and community: A linguistic ethnographic exploration of heteroglossia in the discourse of Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) (2018)
- Tina Pereira: Critical evaluation of the impact of low technology communication aids on the quality of evidence elicited from witnesses with a Learning Disability in Registered Intermediary-mediated Achieving Best Evidence police investigative interviews (2021)
- Katy Brickley: Communicating Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) programmes in the UK: examining tensions in discursive practice (2015)
- Sally Nelson: Directing Jurors in England and Wales: The effect of narrativisation on comprehension (2013)
- Mark Griffiths: Exploring the forensic audiofit: Non-linguistic perceptions, conceptions, descriptions and evaluations of unfamiliar voices in a forensic court (2009)