Biographies
Manal Alharbi
Manal Alharbi is a fourth-year PhD student in the School of English Language, Communication & Philosophy (ENCAP) at Cardiff University. She holds a BA in English language and Literature (Distinction) awarded from King Abdulaziz University/ Saudi Arabia (2001). She received an MSc in Developmental Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (2011). Her main research interest is in how bilingual adults maintain two languages in their brain. She is currently under the supervision of Dr Michelle Aldridge-Waddon looking at the process of lexical access by adult bilinguals whose languages have different scripts namely Arabic and English.
Hamed Aljemaily
I am a second-year PhD student at Cardiff University. Currently, I am working on a project entitled “the phonological effect of Iraqi Arabic as a heritage language on Cardiff English as a native and majority language for adult heritages speakers of Arabic in Cardiff, the UK” under the supervision of Dr. Gerard O’Grady.
Reem’s area of research is language in media and particularly on social media. She is supervised by Dr. Mercedes Durham.
Reem Al Madani
Reem Al Madani is a PhD researcher in the Centre of Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. She received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia and her M.A in Linguistics from the University of Jordan. Before starting her PhD, Reem worked at Effat University in Jeddah – Saudi Arabia as a Lecturer in the Visual and Digital Production Department and she was also the Director of the Management of Communication and Public Relations at the university.
Nasser Alqahtani
Nasser Alqahtani is currently a PhD student at Cardiff University and is also an assistant teacher in the department of English Language at Shaqra University, Saudi Arabia. His research interests are widely within the field of discourse analysis and academic writing. However, his current topic is particularly focusing on metadiscourse markers in academic writing of MA students from Saudi Arabia and how they are compared to their counterparts in the UK.
Zeen Al-Rasheed
Zeen Al-Rasheed is a PhD student in her writing up stage in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy in Cardiff University. In 2013-2014, she was awarded an MA degree in Language Communication Research from the same school. Before pursuing her PhD, she has obtained a BA in Management from Administration & Management College in Mosul University/Iraq in 1987-1988. And later, another BA in English Language from Salahaddin University in Erbil/Kurdistan Region in 2003-2004. In 2009-2010, she has been awarded an MA degree in English Language at the same University.
Mashael Assaadi
Mashael Assaadi is currently in her 4rd year of her PhD in linguistics at Cardiff University. In 2015, she obtained her MA (Hons) in Linguistics-Applied Linguistics from California State University-Fullerton. In 2011, she obtained her BA (Hons) in English Language and linguistics from King Abdul-Aziz University- Saudi Arabia. Mashael’s research interests include semiotics, dialectology, phonetics, phonology, sound symbolism, iconicity of language and cross-linguistic comparison, everyday conversation analysis.
Banan Assiri
Banan is a PhD student at Cardiff University in the Centre of language and Communication Research (CLCR). She had her BA degree in English and Translation Studies (King Khalid University/2012) and her master’s degree in applied Linguistics (Cardiff University/ 2016). Banan PhD research is under the supervision of Prof. Michael Handford. Her research interests include news/media cross-lingual critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and multimodality.
Kate Barber
Kate completed her LLB degree in Law at the University of Southampton before going into teaching. She spent seventeen years teaching EFL, EAP, ESP and Tort Law in Further and Higher Education as well as teaching Legal English to international solicitors in private firms in London. She developed her interest in language and the law by doing a part-time MA in Forensic Linguistics from 2015-2017 and focused on issues relating to online hate speech, sexual violence and harassment, and consent in rape cases. Kate is continuing in these areas of research and is now in the third year of her PhD, looking at discourses on sexual violence within far-right and Manosphere online blogs.
Ellen Bristow
I am a PhD student in Cardiff University’s Centre for Language and Communication Research. My research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Wales Doctoral Partnership. I completed a BA in English (First Class Hons.) at the University of Southampton before working as a secondary school English teacher and teaching assistant. I then moved to Cardiff University with a Master’s Excellence Scholarship to study for an MA in Language and Linguistics in which I achieved a Distinction. For my Master’s research, I was awarded the Nicholas Coupland Prize for Best Performance in Sociolinguistics. My research combines my teaching experience, fascination for etymology and morphology and hope to aid both children’s vocabulary development and pedagogical practices in the English language classroom.
Débora Cabral
Débora Cabral Lima is a first-year PhD student at Cardiff University. She finished her MA in Language and Communication Research with focus on Forensic Linguistics with distinction in 2019. She also has a BA in History, a Portuguese Language and Literature Teaching degree and an MA in Discourse Analysis from the University of Brasilia (UnB). Even though she is now a full-time student, she has worked as a tutor at UnB and Centro Universitário UniCeub, in Brazil. Her areas of interest include Forensic Linguistics, Identity construction, Representation and Genre analysis. Science communication is her passion, so she writes fun texts and participates on podcasts (in Portuguese).
Alex Carr
Alex Carr is a postgraduate researcher at Cardiff University in the Centre of Language and Communication Research (CLCR). His research interests include categorization, lexical semantics and functional grammar, with a particular focus on the classification of nominality and the expression of event semantics in nominal form. His PhD thesis, supervised by Lise Fontaine, proposes to expand our conception of the nature and degree of nominality, through exploring how nominals express temporal semantics, with specific attention provided to underived event nominals, i.e. nouns which express event semantics which have not derived from a verb, e.g. storm, fire, death.
Lucy Chrispin
Lucy Chrispin is an ESRC-funded postgraduate researcher at Cardiff University in the Centre of Language and Communication Research (CLCR). Her research interests include functional grammar, construction grammar and corpus linguistics, with a particular focus on the nature of verb classes and verb constructions. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Lise Fontaine, intends to develop our understanding of intransitive constructions, with a particular focus on what are called behavioural verb constructions in Halliday (1994), which include bodily processes such as coughing, laughing, dreaming, and listening.
Matthew Coombes
Following completion of degrees in Music, Design and Digital Animation, I discovered my passion for linguistics through the works of JRR Tolkien – specifically his invented languages. This encouraged a further degree (Linguistics) at De Montfort, which gave me the opportunity to discover just how influential aesthetics have become in modern day communication. This concluded with the publishing of my first book, The Elvish Writing Systems of JRR Tolkien – the content for which required a significant amount of research through collaborative contact of like-minded scholars. From this point, a PhD was a logical progression in further establishing my work.
Aurora Goodwin
After completing her undergraduate degree in English Language at Cardiff University, Aurora studied a MA in Language and Communication Research, formulating a special interest in Twitter communication as a means of demonstrating stance. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Dr. Tereza Spilioti, focusses upon how Twitter disinformation accounts, active around the 2016 US Presidential Election, used linguistic resources to authenticate identity performances. She intends to investigate impersonations of American citizens by focussing upon the identity aspects presented in their metadata, the use of hashtags as a means of affiliation, and how vernacular features were used in relation to social group identities.
Katharine Kavanagh
Katharine Kavanagh is a first year ESRC-funded PhD student with a background in performing arts, arts criticism, and circus journalism. She has worked as a Lecturer at the National Centre for Circus Arts, London, and as Visiting Lecturer at Circomedia, Bristol and Stockholm University of the Arts. Katharine holds an MA with Distinction in Language and Communication Research from Cardiff University, and recently published her first peer reviewed article:
Katharine’s linguistic interests are in Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis and public representation of minority interests. Her supervisor is Dr Amanda Potts.
Kateryna Krykoniuk
Kateryna Krykoniuk is a third-year PhD Student in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. She holds BPhil and MPhil with distinction from Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine). Her main theoretical interest concerns morphology, and, in particular, word formation. She investigates morphological regularities and patterns that govern the organization of morphemes in word formation processes of various languages and how the meaning of morpheme correlates with their form. Kateryna also works on creating a large morphological meta-corpus of contemporary English. She is an author of a few articles on formal morphology: Word Formation Patterns and Lexical Capacity of Parts of Speech (on Typology of the Persian and Slavic Languages) (Kyiv, 2014), Statistical and Morphological Regularities in Persian Word Formation (Tambov, 2014), A Study of the Persian Morphological Structure by Applying Formal Morphological Analysis (Tehran, 2014), Predictive modelling of Type Valency in Word Formation Grammar (under review).
Ruth Mullineux-Morgan
Ruth Mullineux-Morgan is a PhD student and Research Assistant at Swansea University. She has also held the position of Senior Policy and Public Affairs Adviser at the NSPCC Cymru/Wales for 6 years. Previous experience includes: policy and political liaison at Save the Children Wales, Special Advisor to the First Minister of Wales (Local Government and Communities), Research Assistant on the European Governance in Public Policy (EGIPP) programme, Cardiff University and Political Researcher to Rhodri Morgan AM (former First Minister of Wales), Glenys Kinnock MEP and Eluned Morgan MEP. Ruth has a passion for children’s rights and child protection, particularly working with children and young people to co-produce research and policy development. She holds an MPhil in Public Policy from Cardiff University.
Vigneshwaran Muralidaran
I am a final year PhD student in ENCAP working on finishing up my thesis on developing a Welsh parser as a part of the CorCenCC project. I am from India. I love learning different languages, travel, reading and I enjoy programming. My Masters research was on formulating a Construction Grammar based computational framework to parse Dravidian languages and based on that I implemented a full parser for Tamil. I am interested in exploring the implications of treating language as a functional, usage-based system and how it can be exploited in Language Technology. Since 2017, I am enjoying my my project in ENCAP where I am working on developing an unsupervised full parser for Welsh drawing linguistic insights from my previous work. Currently I am working on CorCenCC project and a Welsh Government project on Welsh word embeddings.
Elisa Ramírez Pérez
Elisa Ramírez Pérez is a second year PhD candidate at Cardiff University specialising in English historical linguistics. More specifically, her PhD project is studying processes of verbal morphology simplification in the late Northumbrian dialect of Old English, focusing mainly on the historical evolution of weak verbs class II. This project stems from a preliminary study Elisa carried out as part of her MPhil thesis at the University of Cambridge in 2017 (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, Newnham College). Prior to this, Elisa completed a BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Westminster (London) where she discovered her passion for historical linguistics. She is also a huge fan of the Bard and all things Shakespeare.
Keighley Perkins
Keighley Perkins is a PhD student in the Department of Applied Linguistics at Swansea University. She previously graduated from the University of Glamorgan (now the University of South Wales) with a degree in English Studies with Education, Cardiff University with a Masters in Forensic Linguistics, and Swansea University with an MPhil in Applied Linguistics. Her research interests include media discourse, health communication, political discourse and visual communication. Her current research is under the supervision of Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Dr Lella Nouri, focusing on the images shared on social media platforms by right-wing extremist groups.
Lisa Pomfrett
I am a part time student who began their PhD in October 2017. I have an interest in institutional language and the application of corpus linguistics methodologies. I have worked in the higher education sector in non-academic roles for over 10 years and this experience has influenced my research.
Emily Powell
Emily graduated from the University of Liverpool with a BA English Language and Literature and since then has been busy teaching on and directing courses in EAP, ESP and teacher training. She has been studying at Cardiff University for several years, completing a PGCE in Post Compulsory Education in 2007, an MA Forensic Linguistics in 2015, and is now in her fifth year of a part time PhD.
Kate Steel
Kate graduated from Queen’s University Belfast with a BA Honours in English in 2007 and an MA with distinction in Linguistics in 2008. After a hiatus from academia, during which she worked abroad in a variety of countries and industries, Kate graduated from Aston University in 2017 with an MSc with distinction in Forensic Linguistics. She is now an ESRC PhD student in the Centre for Language and Communication Research, working on legal-lay communication in domestic abuse policing. Kate’s thesis draws from body-worn video footage to examine police-victim interactions during first response call-outs to domestic incidents in England and Wales.
Stephanie Tilliridou
Stephanie Tilliridou is a part-time PhD student in Language and Communication at Cardiff University. She is a part-time distance learner based in Limassol, Cyprus. At the same time, she is an English Language Teacher and Director of Studies at a Language Institute in Cyprus.
Before pursuing her PhD at Cardiff University, Stephanie Tilliridou has obtained a BA in English Language and English Language Teaching from the University of Sussex and an MA in Education and Professional Studies from King’s College London. Her current doctoral research focuses on how older Facebook users do identity work on their Facebook walls.
Sabrina Toumi
I received a Bachelor of Arts (Hons, Distinction) in Linguistics and English for Specific Purposes in 2014 at Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou in Algeria, where I also successfully completed a Master of Arts in Language and Communication in 2016. In 2017, I undertook a PhD Pre-Sessional programme at Canterbury Christ Church University. I am currently a PhD candidate in Language and Communication at the CLCR, Cardiff University. I am also a PGR tutor in the same school. My research interests revolve mainly around multimodal forms of communication, and the use of rhetorical figures in the genre of political cartoons.
Katharine Young
Katharine Young is a postgraduate researcher at Cardiff University in the Centre of Language and Communication Research (CLCR) and the School of Welsh. Among her research interests are sociolinguistics, native and non-native acquisition of variation, and Welsh-English bilingualism. Her project ‘The Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence in a Welsh Immersion Context’ looks at the stylistic repertoires of pupils at Welsh-medium schools and is jointly funded by Welsh Government and the ESRC.