I am Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), and Co-Director of the University of Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion. I teach and conduct research in subject areas from corpus linguistics to community archiving to digital culture.
I have been at the University of Sheffield since 2015. From 2011 to 2015, I was a research and teaching fellow at the Survey of English Usage at University College London (UCL), where I also completed my PhD in English and MA in English Linguistics.
I am a member of The Keywords Project, the Oxford English Dictionary Advisory Forum, and the White Rose Gender Equality College. I was a council member of Britain’s oldest learned society, The Philological Society, from 2012 to 2020.
Research interests
I am primarily active in two broad research areas: corpus semantics and community archiving.
My recent corpus semantic research focuses on words with multiple contested meanings, which lead to cross purposes and confusion in public debate and personal conversation: for example, decolonisation, gentrification, appropriation, fundamentalism, and white. These contentious multiple meanings often include newly emerging senses, and exhibit increasing vagueness.
I lead on the DHI’s concept modelling research, based on the Linguistic DNA project and subsequent collaborations with the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary.
My community archiving research is conducted in collaboration with a team of academic and non-academic researchers in rural South Africa, and employs community- led co-production methods. That work has supported the creation of community archives in the form of ‘live’ records of unfolding events; and records of the living memories of older adults; as a means for building capacity and exploring concepts of development and identity.
As Co-Director of the Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion, I support community archiving by racially marginalised PhD students at the University of Sheffield; and facilitate co-production between racially marginalised PhD students and local and regional social and racial justice organisations.
My recent and ongoing externally funded projects include:
- Sheffield Centre for Equity and Inclusion. Office for Students and Research England. (As Co-Director).
- Community-led impact for rural land rights in South Africa: A multilingual best practice handbook. AHRC. (As Principal Investigator).
- Many Happy Returns – Enabling Reusable Packaging Systems. Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge. (As Co-Investigator).
- Land rights in rural South Africa: Creating a record of practice in an ongoing crisis. AHRC Urgency Grant. (As Principal Investigator).
- Mapping community heritage with young people in rural South Africa. AHRC GCRF Network Plus Funding. (As Principal Investigator).
I support the DHI in developing research projects, programmes, and proposals, across a wide range of Digital Humanities subject areas.
Teaching interests
I welcome PhD applications related to corpus linguistics, semantics, Keywords, lexicography and lexicology, community archiving, technology for inclusion, and digital humanities.
Teaching activities
I am the DHI’s Director of Postgraduate Research.
I contribute to teaching on the DHI’s MA in Digital Culture and Communication and MA in Cultural Data Management and Communication. With the other members of the team behind those programmes, I received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Learning and Teaching in Collaborative Activities in 2022. I am module leader for IPA61003, Language Analysis, AI, and Culturomics, and I deliver teaching and supervision for IPA61005 Introduction to Digital Culture, and IPA61006, Digital Culture and Cultural Data e-Portfolio.