At the graduation ceremony on Friday 30th November 2018, Maria Fotiadou will receive her PhD. After achieving a First Class degree in English Language and Literature in the School of Culture in 2014, Maria was awarded a full scholarship by the School which allowed her to pursue research under the supervision of Dr Michael Pearce and Professor Angela Smith. The thesis is a wide-ranging study of the language of careers services as it is represented on UK university websites, with a particular focus on ‘employability’. Combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, Dr Fotiadou’s research reveals the nature of the discourse surrounding this problematic concept, as shown in an extensive and innovative analysis of repeated patterns of collocation and more extended phraseological clusters in a multi-million-word corpus. Her work is beginning to have an impact in the field of critical linguistics, with a double-length article based on her thesis research appearing in the prestigious journal Critical Discourse Studies, and further articles in preparation.
