Dr Robert Lawson

Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics

Email:
robert.lawson@bcu.ac.uk

As an award-winning academic with 15 years of experience investigating the relationship between language and society, Dr Robert Lawson has produced world-leading research with tangible real-world benefits, as well as establishing new research paradigms in media linguistics and applied language studies. Dr Lawson completed his ESRC-funded PhD thesis at the University of Glasgow, focusing on urban adolescent language use in a Glasgow high school.

Since joining Birmingham City University in 2009, Dr Lawson has expanded his focus to encompass research on language in the media, language and masculinities, and the application of sociolinguistic research beyond academia, drawing on a range of methodologies and approaches. He is a former Fulbright Scholar (University of Pittsburgh, 2012), a former Junior Visiting Professor (University of Jyväskylä, 2019), a Research Fellow at IRMS, and was awarded the “I am BCU” Researcher of the Year award in 2023. He has published in a number of major international journals, including Applied Corpus Linguistics, Discourse, Context & Media, English World-Wide, Gender & Language, Methods in Psychology, Annual Review of Linguistics, Social Media+Society, and Journal of Sociolinguistics. He is also the editor of Sociolinguistics in Scotland (Palgrave, 2014), the co-editor of Sociolinguistics: Application and Impact (Routledge, 2016), and the author of Language and Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2023).

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