Room: NW920A
E-mail: m.giovanelli@aston.ac.uk
Phone: 0121 204 3209

I am Reader in Literary Linguistics in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA).

BA(Hons) English Language and Literature (Liverpool)

MA Literary Linguistics (Nottingham)

PhD Cognitive Stylistics (Nottingham)

PGCE (Open)

Head of English, Languages and Applied Linguistics  

Co-Director Aston Stylistics Research Group (ASRG)

I am a stylistician with particular interests in the application of Text World Theory and Cognitive Grammar to literary discourse, the language of poetry, health humanities, and English in education. 

My monograph, the first book-length study of a canonical English poet using Text World Theory, Text World Theory and Keats' Poetry: The Cognitive Poetics of Desire, Dreams and Nightmares, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2013. A textbook, written with my colleague Dr Chloe Harrison, Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics was published in September 2018, with a second edition due in 2023 . My 2022 monograph, The Language of Siegfried Sassoon (Palgrave Macmillan), draws on Cognitive Grammar to explore Sassoon's poetry, prose and non-fiction and is my latest output in what is a long-standing interest in Sassoon's work.

More recently I have begun exploring the language of 'covid poetry' (defined as poetry directly influenced by and/or representing the experience of living through the pandemic). This reserach combines text analysis with reader response data generated from questionnaires and reading group discussion. Pandemic reading also features in The Lockdown LIbrary Project, a study of reading habits during the first UK lockdown in March 2020 that I ran with colleagues at Aston. We are currently writing our findings up into a book Reading Habits in the Covid Pandemic: An Applied Linguistic Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan).

My interests in English education focus on applications of cognitive linguistics in pedagogical contexts, grammar teaching, and the ways in which literature is discussed and studied in educational settings. For more on this see the studyingfiction website which I run with Dr Jessica Mason (Sheffield Hallam University).  Our book, Studying Fiction, was published by Routledge in April 2021. My current work in this area is concerned with the value teachers attach to emotion in the literature classroom.

For several years, I have co-directed the Integrating English project with Dr Andrea Macrae (Oxford Brookes University) and Professor Billy Clark (Northumbria University). We are interested in developing more integrated approaches to the subject at all levels of education. We run annual summer conferences for secondary practitioners, publish digests of research and teaching ideas to support English teachers, and act as the editorial board for Mesh, a journal for undergraduate students to showcase their work in integrated lang-lit studies. In 2017 we undertook and published research on the perception and awareness of post-16 curriculum reform amongst academics in university English departments (funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme small research grant).

I currently supervise five doctoral researchers

Ahcene Adjeb: Literary education in Algeria

Polina Gavin: Cognitive stylistics and ekphrastic poetry

Caroline Godfrey: Genealogies of metaphors for curriculum English

Christopher Walker: Stylistics and teacher identity

Mel Wardle Woodend: Poetry and wellbeing

Areas of research supervision

I would be very happy to talk to prospective doctoral reserachers interested in any of the following areas:

Literary linguistics: stylistic applications of Text World Theory and Cognitive Grammar to literary discourse; cognitive poetics; pedagogical stylistics; stylistics of poetry; poetry and wellbeing/bibliotherapy; stylistics of children’s literature; First World War literature.

Language and literature in education: applied cognitive linguistics; studying fiction; discourses about English in educational settings; integrating language and literature; reader response theories and education.

Literature in History

Literary Genres in English

Stylistics

Cognitive Poetics

Language and Literature in Education

Undergraduate dissertation supervision

PhD supervision

I am a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (currently Membership Secretary), the British Association for Applied Linguistics, The Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship (currently Treasurer), the National Association for the Teaching of English (member of Post-16/Higher Education Commitee) and the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLiE).

I am editor of Siegfried's Journal, the journal of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship.

I am associate editor and editorial board member of two leading international peer-reviewed journals: English in Education; and English Studies. I am also on the editorial board of Journal of Literary Semantics.

I act as a reviewer for a number of other journals in stylistics, applied linguistics, literary studies, and education.