I am an applied linguist. In my teaching and research, I explore the role of language in many domains of everyday life. I am primarily interested in how our linguistic choices (both conscious and subconscious) communicate social information to others about who we are, as people – where we are from, what we do, what we want others to think about us, and so on. And beyond matters of language and identity, I am also intrigued by how language mediates our relationships with others: for example, what is the linguistic work that we do, in order to "perform" our roles as parents, children, lovers, bosses, workers, teachers, learners, friends, community members, etc….and how do others, in turn, use language to respond to us? For instance, in what ways do other people let us know that our utterances are acceptable and appropriate…or not? In what ways do we use language to signal our alignment with (or distance from) others?

I came to language studies with an academic background in Art History, and this prior education in the Humanities has informed my scholarly perspective as an applied linguist. In a broader sense though, I have actually been a student of language my entire life. I grew up in a bilingual family. I studied French, Italian, German, and Thai in formal classroom settings. I later acquired Spanish as an adult. And I have taught English in the U.S., the Czech Republic, Thailand and Argentina. I earned a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University.

Currently, I am a Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of South Florida (USF). At USF, I enjoy teaching students enrolled in our programs: Ph.D. in Linguistics and Applied Language Studies (LALS), MA in Applied Linguistics/TESL, and B.A. concentration in Applied Linguistics. I regularly teach courses such as Language of the Internet, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Cross-Cultural Issues in Language Teaching, and Qualitative Research Methods.

I work in Tampa, but I live across the Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida. I appreciate the diversity of my city, my neighborhood, and my community. When I'm not working, I love to travel around the world.

Introducing the key questions and challenges faced by the researcher of digital discourse, this edited volume provides an overview of the different methodological dimensions associated with this type of research. Bringing together a team of experts, each chapter guides students and novice researchers through how to conduct rigorous, accurate, and ethical research with data from a wide range of online platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and online dating apps. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis focuses on the key issues that any digital discourse analyst must consider, before tackling more specific topics and approaches, including how to work with multilingual or multimodal data. Emphasizing concrete, practical advice and illustrated with plentiful examples from research studies, each chapter introduces a new research dimension for consideration, briefly exploring how other discourse analysts have approached the topic before presenting an in-depth case study, which discusses challenges and provide guidances on methodological decision-making. Supported by a range of pedagogical tools, including discussion questions and annotated further-reading lists, this book is an essential resource for students and any researcher new to analyzing digital discourse.

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The past decade has seen the emergence of many social media platforms associated with new digital affordances and distinctive user practices. My latest book project, Language, Creativity and Humour Online (Routledge), explores the ludic dimensions of our online interactions in social media. Drawing on the related Bakhtinian notions of voicing, polyphony, and heteroglossia, I offer insights into the creative discourse practices found in diverse digital contexts. Among these is a focus on the various forms of social identity work that are accomplished through such practices. "Non-serious" online content is easily dismissed as trivial, and is often overlooked in academic scholarship on social media discourse. However, the large-scale dissemination and circulation of creative and humorous content points to its mass appeal to a large group of users of digital technology. Offering close analyses of discourse found in novelty Twitter accounts, chat posts on Tumblr, and parody product reviews on Amazon, Language, Creativity and Humour Online sheds light on the linguistic and interactional mechanisms underlying various types of creative, playful and humorous online texts.

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My 2014 book, The Discourse of Online Reviews, Bloomsbury Publishing, examines a corpus of over 1,000 consumer reviews and discusses many of the discourse features that are characteristic of this rapidly growing, computer-mediated, and primarily text-based, genre. In it, I investigate the language used by reviewers as they forge connections with their audiences to draw them into their stories, as they construct their expertise and authority on various subjects, as they evaluate and assess their consumer experiences, and as they display their knowledge about the very genre in which they are participating. Adopting an eclectic approach to the analysis of discourse, which employs techniques from narrative analysis to corpus linguistics, this book explores topics such as evaluation, identity, and intertextuality, as they occur in online reviews of hotels, restaurants, recipes, films, and other consumer products.

Find the book at Bloomsbury Publishing or Amazon