University of Sunderland

Language and culture

The English department has research strengths in the field of language and culture, broadly defined. Three members of staff work in this area.

Dr Susan Mandala's main interests are in the stylistics of fiction and drama.  She is particularly interested in how sociolinguistic and pragmatic theories of ordinary talk can be applied to inform our understanding of literary, dramatic, and televisual texts.  Her recent work has focused on science fiction and fantasy, and her essay on Chinese and code switching in Firefly appeared in Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier ( London :  I.B. Tauris, 2008).  Her first book, Twentieth Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary Talk: Speaking Between the Lines , was published by Ashgate Press in 2007, and her second, The Language of Science Fiction and Fantasy, is under contract with Continuum.

Dr Michael Pearce's research interests in political discourse in the media and corpus linguistics are reflected in several journal articles which have appeared in Language and Literature (2001, 2005), Text (2004) and Corpora (2008). He is also interested in the English of North East England and has recently completed the first stage of a large-scale project on the perceptual dialectology of the North East (published in the Journal of English Linguistics 2009), and as a result of this has featured in the media (including BBC radio and ITV local news). Dr Pearce is also the author of The Routledge Dictionary of English Studies (2007).

Dr Angela Smith, whose interests include language and the media, language and gender, and children's literacy, has recently won a major AHRC award of £53,000 for a project entitled: 'Gendered Constructions of the Professional Journalist: A Case Study Examining Discourses of the Public and Private around Kate Adie'. This two-year project which involves a collaboration with Dr Michael Higgins at Strathclyde University, will draw on data from the Kate Adie Collection held at the University of Sunderland and  culminate in a series of academic publications on the working practices of the BBC reporter. Dr Smith is also part of the MEDAL < medal.unn.ac.uk> project, based at the University of Northumbria. This group promotes learning and teaching in childhood studies through a focus on academic literacy. She is also involved in several projects on gender, media celebrity, and post feminist discourses in the media, with colleagues at UEA, Strathclyde and Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh .