My research interests sit at the intersection between critical and literary linguistics, which I approach primarily from a cognitive linguistic perspective. My PhD thesis explored the language used by soldiers to describe their performance of acts of violence, using frameworks from Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Poetics to develop a systematic discussion of the discursive construction of agency, intentionality, and responsibility. My recent chapter in 'New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style' continues along this theme, seeking to explain how the distinction between intentional and unintentional actions can be modelled within Cognitive Grammar for the purposes of critical and literary analysis.

I am also interested in language and cognition more generally, including in multimodal contexts. In 2019, I co-authored a paper with Dr Sara Whiteley which explored the disconnect between lyrical meaning and listener interpretation of the song 'Hey Ya!' by Outkast, and I remain interested in the emergence and development of musical and other multimodal stylistic approaches.

My current research continues to apply cognitive linguistic models to the stylistic analysis a range of texts. This work includes forthcoming papers on the discursive construction of identity in military drone operators' autobiographical narratives, and the language of blame in legal discourse. I am currently working on an ESRC-funded research project with colleagues at Aston University, to explore the role of cognitive poetic frameworks in forensic linguistic authorship analysis.

Before joining Warwick in 2021, I held various teaching and lectureship posts at Sheffield, Liverpool, and De Montfort University. My PhD research, which I completed at the University of Sheffield in 2018, was generously funded by the Wolfson Foundation