Staff profile

Dr Cara Penry Williams


she/her/hers

Senior Lecturer in English Language

Subject

English, Creative Writing and Publishing

College

College of Arts, Humanities and Education

Department

Humanities

Campus

Kedleston Road, Derby Campus

Email

C.PenryWilliams@derby.ac.uk

About

I am a Senior Lecturer in English Language and the subject leader for Joint Honours English Language (not currently recruiting). As well as teaching undergraduate students on the BA (Hons) English course, I research topics in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. I also am on the research leadership team for the School of Humanities and Journalism with a role centred on supporting our postgraduate researchers.

Teaching responsibilities

I am the module leader for:

I also teach elements of:

I am currently the Director of Studies on two PhD projects and I am available for PhD supervision on topics related to my expertise (see my research interests and recent publications).

Research interests

My research includes studies of English looking at interactional functions of pragmatic markers such as 'sort of' and 'and stuff like that'. I also study everyday discussions of language variation and the ideologies behind these. I examine how these relate to social meanings of language use and interactional or local ethnographic identities.

Recently, I have been considering the relationships between language and violence, exploring different ways linguistics can contribute to understanding these.

A lot of my research focuses on describing and understanding Australian English.

Qualifications

International experience

I am an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University.

I previously taught linguistics at La Trobe University, and linguistics, academic skills and applied linguistics at the University of Melbourne (both in Melbourne, Australia).

Recent publications

See some of my recent publications via the University of Derby Repository. For a full listing of my research activities and co-authors, see my Academia.edu or ResearchGate profile (these are all direct links to my profiles).