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International International

Key Profile Area: Skills and Structures in Language and Cognition Members

All Members of the Global Faculty

Prof. Dr. Michaela Mahlberg
 

Member of the Global Faculty

Professor of Corpus Linguistics, University of Birmingham, UK

Michaela Mahlberg is Professor of Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She studied English and Mathematics at the University of Bonn and the University of Exeter. In 2004, she obtained a PhD from Saarland University (Germany). Before joining the University of Birmingham in 2015, she held a chair in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. She previously held positions at the University of Liverpool, Liverpool Hope University College, and the University of Bari (Italy). Michaela is the editor of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins) and together with Gavin Brookes she edits the book series Corpus and Discourse (Bloomsbury). She is the Vice President of the international Dickens Society, she is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute in London, and she hosts the podcast “Life and Language”.

In her research, Michaela looks at language in a range of socio-cultural contexts - from 21st century news discourses to 19th century children’s literature. She is particularly interested in the relationship between fiction and the real-world, how we use language to do things, and how the stories we tell help us make sense of the world. Michaela has been leading the development of the web application CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context), which is now used in over 100 countries globally.

 
Selected publications

  • Čermáková, A., & Mahlberg, M. (2021). The representation of mothers and the gendered social structure of nineteenth-century children’s literature. English Text Construction, 14(2), 119–149. https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.00044.cer
  • Fuoli, M., Clarke, I., Wiegand, V., Ziezold, H., & Mahlberg, M. (2021). Responding Effectively to Customer Feedback on Twitter: A Mixed Methods Study of Webcare Styles. Applied Linguistics, 42(3), 569–595. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amaa046
  • Mahlberg, M., Wiegand, V., Stockwell, P., & Hennessey, A. (2019). Speech-bundles in the 19th-century English novel. Language and Literature, 28(4), 326–353. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963947019886754
  • O’Donnell, M. B., Scott, M., Mahlberg, M., & Hoey, M. (2012). Exploring text-initial words, clusters and concgrams in a newspaper corpus. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 8(1), 73–101. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2012-0004
  • Mahlberg, M. (2006). Lexical cohesion: Corpus linguistic theory and its application in English language teaching. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 11(3), 363–383. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.11.3.08mah