The Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare’s Language project team includes members from three different departments in two faculties at Lancaster University, and one member from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Principal Investigator
Professor Jonathan Culpeper
(Lancaster University, Linguistics and English Language)
Jonathan Culpeper is Professor of Linguistics and English Language. He specialises in the language styles of historical speech-related texts, including drama, and in English pragmatics (both historical and present-day), with a particular focus on politeness and impoliteness. He also has an interest in cognitive stylistics, especially with regard to drama.
Chief Advisor
Professor Tony McEnery
(Lancaster University, Linguistics and English Language)
Tony McEnery is Distinguished Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University. He undertakes research using corpus linguistics in a range of areas across theoretical and applied linguistics. As well as undertaking ‘blue skies’ research, he has done applied work with a range of partner organizations in the public sector (e.g. the Environment Agency and the Home Office) and the private sector (e.g. with BT, IBM, and Nokia).
Co-Investigators
Professor Dawn Archer
(Manchester Metropolitan University, Languages, Linguistics and TESOL)
Dawn Archer is Professor of Pragmatics and Corpus Linguistics. Her areas of expertise include pragmatics (modern and historical), corpus linguistics and the discursive practices of the (historical) English courtroom. She also has a growing interest in the language of emotion (and the linguistic performance of emotion).
Professor Alison Findlay
(Lancaster University, English & Creative Writing)
Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama and Director of the Shakespeare Programme in the Department of English and Creative Writing. She specialises in sixteenth and seventeenth century drama and early modern women’s writing.
Dr. Andrew Hardie
(Lancaster University, Linguistics and English Language)
Andrew Hardie’s major specialism is corpus linguistics – specifically, the methodology of corpus linguistics, and how it can be applied to different areas of study in linguistics and beyond (in English and in other languages). He is currently working on applications of corpus methods in the social sciences and humanities.
Dr. Paul Rayson
(Lancaster University, Computing and Communications)
Paul Rayson is a Reader in Computer Science and Director of the UCREL interdisciplinary research centre which carries out research in corpus linguistics and natural language processing (NLP). He specialises in the application of semantic-based NLP in extreme circumstances where language is noisy e.g. in historical, learner, speech, email, txt and other CMC varieties, and his applied research includes the areas of online child protection, learner dictionaries, and text mining of historical corpora and annual financial reports.
Research Associates
Dr. Jane Demmen
(Lancaster University, Linguistics and English Language)
Jane Demmen is a Senior Research Associate with research interests in corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics and sociolinguistics, stylistics (particularly of Early Modern English plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries), semantic analysis and metaphor.
Dr. Sean Murphy
(Lancaster University, Linguistics and English Language)
Sean Murphy is a Senior Research Associate whose research interests include stylistics, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, applied linguistics in general, teacher education and English language teaching. He has previously carried out a detailed study of the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s plays.
Isolde van Dorst
(Lancaster University, Linguistics and English Language)
Isolde van Dorst is a Researcher in the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University. She is also involved with the compilation of the Written BNC2014, and the Chronotopic Cartographies project. Her research interests are in corpus linguistics, computational (language) modelling, Early Modern English, and politeness studies. After successfully completing her MA/MSc thesis in collaboration with the Shakespeare project, she stayed on to continue her involvement as a researcher.
Project Administrator
Mathew Gillings
(Lancaster University, Linguistics and English Language)
Mathew Gillings is a PhD Student in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. His research interests are in corpus, forensic, and sociolinguistics, and he is currently using corpus methods to investigate verbal cues to deception.