Role

Senior Lecturer in English Language (School of English) and Tutoral Fellow in Modern Languages (SCLS).

Director of the Applied Linguistics MA programme

My research interests are in the areas of discourse analysis and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and stylistics. I have edited a volume on spoken discourse, 'Dietro il parlato' for Firenze, La Nuova Italia, and published a number of articles on news discourse and stylistics in edited volumes and international journals. In the area of literature my interests lie in 19th and 20th century Italian and European literature and cinema. A recent paper on the discursive representation of children in Italian cinema appeared in Australian journal 'Spunti e ricerche' in 2010.

My monograph on the discourse of Italian cinema for the stylistics series of Continuum press has come out in 2011 and a co-edited volume on the  discourse of fictional film and television for John Benjamins press will appear August 2011. I am now exploring the cross-fertilisation of cinema and theatre.

With the University of Siena in Italy I worked on an EU-funded international project on the representation of European identity in British and Italian TV news (IntUne) and have finalised a co-authored paper [with G. Williams and D . Giuliani] ‘Nation and supernation: a tale of three Europes’ in G. Williams and P. Bailey eds. 2012 The Discourse of Europe Oxford OUP, 55-83.

In the area of news analysis I have studied the representation of the 2003 Iraq war: ‘This is a war of words': News is reporting what was said: techniques for attribution in Italian TG5 and RAI1, American CBS and BBC newsreaders' and reporters' discourse of the 2003 Iraq war', in L. Haarman and L. Lombardo (eds.), Iraq War on Television, London, Continuum and a co-authored paper entitled 'Patterns and functions of human interest stories in three corpora of TV Iraq war news' has recently appeared in the 'Journal of Pragmatics'. I am presently exploring the cohesiveness of TV news texts in relation to reported discourse and am finalising a co-authoredpaper on the verbal-visual relaiton in British and American 2009 news corpus.

My recent interest is personal and social identity in particular of disenfranchised groups. I have finalised a study of place-identity in a group of Irish travellers in the South of England, have a second one in preparation and have submitted a small grant applicaiton to BA for a project that includes the media treatment of these groups, the role of institutions and authorities and the perceptions of local residents. I have a contract for a co-edited volume with Palgrave to come out in 2014 that reflects on such socially marked identities.

I am also interested in students' discourse: 2007 ‘Questioning and politeness strategies in the construction of students’ identity in English and Italian academic seminars’. In A. Rubino (ed.) 2007, Lingua, identità e comunicazione in contesti anglofoni e italiani. 'Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata', 3, SILTA, Rome.

A joint paper on the discourse of memory and the narratives produced by some Roman Jews during the Nazi occupation of Italy was presented at the next IABA international conference held at Sussex university in June-July 2010. I am now finalising a co-authored paper to be submitted to 'Narrative Inquiry'

Linguistics Research Project. Investigating Language in Context. Approaches to Discourse. The Discourse of Personal and Social Identity. Language and Gender.

Discourse and Communication Analysis (MA). MA supervision.

Europe 1 and 2. Genres in European Prose. Themes in European Theatre and Cinema. Aspects of Italy. Italian translation for finalists. Italian Special Subject. 

Student Consultation

My office hours are Monday 10.00-11.00 and by appointment.

Piazza, Roberta (2012) Conflict discourse and cognitive processing in Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata (SILTA), XLI (2). pp. 317-336. ISSN 0390-6809