Dr Amanda Potts

Senior Lecturer

School of English, Communication and Philosophy

: pottsa@cardiff.ac.uk
: +44 (0)29 2087 4912
: 3.60, John Percival Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU

: Available for postgraduate supervision

I am a Senior Lecturer in Public and Professional Discourse. My specialism is in corpus-based critical discourse analysis of texts and topics in public and professional communication, most recently: media discourse, medical communication, and language of the law. In my work, I usually take a mixed methodological approach, exploring some combination of the topics below:

semantics
metaphor analysis
analysis of culture
sociolinguistics
representations of identity
gender/sexuality
investigation of discriminatory discourses
discourse communities in social media

As Principal Investigator, I have successfully obtained over £270,000 in funding from the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and the UK Government.

In 2017, I became a founding co-editor of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, published by Cardiff University Press. JCaDS is a peer-reviewed, online, open-access journal publishing corpus-assisted research into discourse, defined as language in use as a vehicle of communication. JCaDS is pluridisciplinary: we welcome studies from all areas of the humanities and social sciences that incorporate corpus techniques in investigating how spoken and written language is used and how meanings are created and explored.

I am a member of the Centre for Language and Communication Research, the Cardiff Corpus Network, and CaLL: Cardiff Language and Law.

Education and qualifications

Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practices, Lancaster University, UK
Ph.D. Linguistics, Lancaster University, UK
Master of Applied Linguistics (with merit), Sydney University, Australia
Bachelor of Arts: Humanistic Studies in Literature (summa cum laude), Adelphi University, USA

Professional memberships

Fellow, Higher Education Academy
Member, British Association for Applied Linguistics
Member, International Gender and Language Association
Member, Law and Society Association

Academic positions

Senior Research Associate, Lancaster University

Committees and reviewing

Cardiff University committees

Education Committee: School of English, Communication and Philosophy
Research Committee: School of English, Communication and Philosophy

External committees

Board of Studies (as external examiner): University of Gloucestershire, Nottingham Trent University
Founding co-editor: Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies

We are currently unable to retrieve the list of publications. Visit our institutional repository.

I currently teach on three undergraduate modules:

Reading and Writing in the Digital Age (Year 1)
Discourse (Year 2)
Language and Popular Culture (Year 3)

And one postgraduate module:

Corpus Linguistics (MA)

In previous years, I have taught Introduction to Media Communication, Media Discourse, Forensic Linguistics, Forensic Linguistics 2, Research Foundations, and Lifespan Communication at Cardiff University, in addition to various undergraduate modules (Corpus-based English Language Studies; Discourse Analysis; Introduction to English Language; Language and Style) and postgraduate modules (Research Methods; Corpus Linguistics) at Lancaster University.

I am interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of:

Corpus-based (critical) discourse analysis
(Social) media discourse
Language of law
Discourse and identity
Language, gender, and sexuality

Current supervision

Katharine Kavanagh

Research student

Phanupong Thumnong

Research student

Past projects

Lead co-supervisor (50%) for Kate Barber - "(Re)framing rape: A sociocognitive discourse analysis of sexual violence at the intersection of white and male supremacy" (awarded 2022)