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Professor Sylvia Jaworska 

Sylvia Jaworska
  • +44 (0) 118 378 7885
  • Professor of Language and Professional Communication
  • Head of Department

 

Areas of interest

Sylvia explores professional communication in (new) media, business and health settings focusing predominantly (but not exclusively) on the ways in which language and other semiotic choices are used to construct identities and perpetuate social stereotyping, biases and stigma. She is also interested in persuasive discourse and the fine line between persuasion and manipulation. Her research is interdisciplinary, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural. She examines discourse and communication using tools and techniques from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis as well as other quantitative and qualitative methods adopted in linguistics and social sciences including interviews, focus groups and surveys. Beyond academia, Sylvia engages in consultancy work on matters pertaining to equality, diversity and inclusion in workplace, and effective organisational communication for and between diverse stakeholders.

Current funded projects:

Co-Investigator: Maternal Well-Being, Infant Feeding and Return to Paid Work funded by the Nuffield Trust (2022-2025)

Past funded projects: 

Co-Investigator: Health Claims UnpackedInvestigating the Communication of Scientific Health Claims on Food - a large interdisciplinary project funded by the European Institute of Innovation & Technology/Horizon 2020 (2018-2022)

Co-Investigator: Quarantined between Cultures, British Academy, Special Research Grants: Covid-19 (2021-2022)  

Postgraduate supervision

Sylvia supervises/co-supervises seven PhD students.

Teaching

Currently, Sylvia teaches the following modules:

  • LS3/MCBL: Introduction to Corpus Linguistics
  • LS3LPC: Language in Professional Communication

Background

Other activities involve: 

Publications

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