Maria Fotiadou awarded PhD

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.

Re-reading Spare Rib

Professor Angela Smith has edited a collection of essays about Spare Rib, one of the most iconic symbols of Second Wave Feminism, whose influence has far out-lived the span of its publication (1972-1993).  Re-Reading Spare Rib (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) examines various aspects of the magazine - based on the digitised publication by the British Library in 2015 - in order to explore the ways in which it has influenced society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the lives of individual readers. By analysing several articles from a modern, post-feminist perspective, and using cross-generational interviews of Spare Rib readers and reflective accounts of reading the publication, the significance and endurance of the publication is demonstrated. Written by academics, experienced researchers and independent scholars alike, the inter-disciplinary nature of the text results in a multi-dimensional reading of Spare Rib suitable for both an academic and general readership interested in cultural and media studies.

In addition to Angela, two other members of the School of Culture have contributed chapters: Dr Kath Kerr-Koch, and PhD student Maria Fotiadou. Other Sunderland contributions come from Professor Catherine Donovan, Professor Donna Chambers, Professor Bridget Cooper, Dr Sheila Quaid,  Dr Rob Worrall, Dr Paul-Alan Armstrong, Trish Bryans, and Helen Fraser.

PhD student gives paper at major international linguistics conference

PhD student Maria Fotiadou has recently given a paper at the 9th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (Birmingham University). Her paper explored the issue of competitiveness in the ‘graduate job market’ and the notion of ‘employability’, as presented by Universities in the UK through their career services webpages. It is part of a wider project that seeks to understand the role of careers services inside academia. With a combination of Critical Discourse Analysis methods and Corpus Linguistics tools, the analysis focuses on identifying, interpreting, explaining and evaluating (Baker and McEnery, 2015, pp. 2-3) the ‘reality’ presented by these services as students are expected to ‘invest’ their time at university in getting prepared for the transition from HE to the workplace.

Discourse, culture and politics

 

PhD student Maria Fotiadou has given a paper at an interdisciplinary symposium in the humanities and social sciences organized by the Newcastle Critical Discourse Group and held at Newcastle University (18th May 2016). Her talk, entitled 'Careers advisers' expert roles in UK university websites', examined a corpus consisting of approximately 2.6 million words from 58 UK Universities' Careers and Employability webpages. Her analysis looked at collocations of the keyword 'careers', then considered personal and impersonal self-representation as revealed in high-frequency phraseological patterns.

Discourse and democracy

Culture PhD student Maria Fotiadou has had a review of Michael Farrelly's Discourse and Democracy: Critical Analysis of the Language of Government (Routledge, 2015) published in Critical Discourse Studies.

PhD student at Corpus Linguistics 2015

In July, PhD student Maria Fotiadou attended the 8th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2015) at Lancaster University. She gave a poster presentation entitled 'Have you developed your entrepreneurial skills? Looking back to the development of a skills-oriented Higher Education.' You can read the poster abstract here.

Sunderland culture graduate receives PhD studentship

Maria Fotiadou, who graduated with First Class honours in BA English Language and Literature in 2014, has been awarded a three-year studentship to pursue doctoral research in the Department of Culture. She will be using corpus-assisted methods to explore the discourses of employability in the context of UK higher education. Her work will be supervised by Drs Mike Pearce and Angela Smith.