Marcello Giovanelli is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for the Critical Inquiry into Society and Culture at Aston University. He is a stylistician with particular interests in the application of Text World Theory and Cognitive Grammar to literary discourse; his current research uses cognitive stylistic methods to examine how the experience of war is variously construed in the poetry, prose, letters and diaries of Siegfried Sassoon. Recent publications include the monograph Text World Theory and Keats' Poetry: The Cognitive Poetics of Desire, Dreams and Nightmares (2013) and the textbook Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics (written with Chloe Harrison, and published in 2018).

Writing an abstract for this talk is a MAEL Research Methods Assignment.

Zsófia Demjén is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at the UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics. Her research interests include health communication, metaphor and especially the intersections of language, mind and health(care). Her most recent projects involved investigating metaphor and humour in the context of cancer and linguistic patterns in the representation of voice-hearing experiences.

She is the author of Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States: Written Discourse and the Experience of Depression. (2015, Bloomsbury), co-author of Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A corpus-based study (2018, Routledge), editor of Applying Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts (2020, Bloomsbury), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (2017). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics, Applied Linguistics, Journal of Literary Semantics, Metaphor and the Social World, Communication & Medicine, Discourse Studies, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics and the BMJ’s Medical Humanities among others.

Writing an abstract for this talk is a MAEL Research Methods Assignment.