Room: NW920A
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: 0121 204 3209

I am Professor of Stylistics in the School of Law and Social Sciences 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 the Department of Communication and Culture

Co-Director Aston Stylistics Research Centre (ASRC)

My research interests are in cognitive stylistics, corpus stylistics, empirical literary studies, the language of poetry, health and public humanities, and English in education. 

Most of my work in literary linguistics draws on Text World Theory and/or Cogntive Grammar to analyse the style and interpretation of texts. 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 second edition of a textbook, written with my colleague Dr Chloe Harrison, Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics was published in September 2024. 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). A current project 'Writing and Reading the Pandemic' (funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship) integrates text analysis using cognitive and corpus stylistic methods 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. Our book Reading Habits in the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Applied Linguistic Perspective was published in 2024 by 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. Recent work in this area is concerned with the value teachers attach to emotion in the literature classroom. I have also recently published on grammar teaching and language awareness in the curriculum and maintain an unswerving commitment to the value of stylistics as the best conceptualisation of subject English at all levels.

I have supervised seven doctoral researchers to completion as main supervisor. 

Current doctoral researchers working with me are

Shirin Sheikh Farshi: The cognitive poetics of drama

Shannon Franklin: Representing the pandemic in covid prose fiction

Christopher Walker: Stylistics and teacher identity

Isabella Wetson: The pedagogical application of Cognitive Grammar

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.

At Aston I have taught the following modules

Undergraduate

Literature in History

Literary Genres in English

Stylistics

Cognition and Style

Language and Literature in Education

Spoken Discourse Analysis

Postgraduate

Cognitive Poetics

Reading and Wellbeing

I am a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (and a former Membership Secretary), the British Association for Applied Linguistics, The Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship (currently Treasurer), and the National Association for the Teaching of English (member of Management Commitee). I sit on the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLiE), and on the Executive Committee of University English.

I am a trustee of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship,  of the National Association for the Teaching of English, and of Litdrive.

I am co-editor of two major series for Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Elements in Stylistics and Cambridge Topics in English Language.

I am a previous 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 and of Journal of Poetry Therapy.

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

I am a member of the ESRC Peer Review College.