Graduate Profiles

Dr Anna Siyanova

I obtained an MA in Applied Linguistics from the School of English, University of Nottingham, in 2006. Having really enjoyed my MA year and having secured funding from the ESRC, I embarked on a three-year PhD – the most amazing three years of my life. They were both challenging and rewarding, tiring and energising, frustrating and motivating. I enjoyed every single day of my PhD and have never regretted the path taken. The level of supervision received in the School of English and the School of Psychology was beyond any words. I have also managed to present widely and publish some of my research and am continuing to collaborate with my Nottingham supervisors and colleagues.

When in the final year of my PhD, I applied for a two-year position of a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. Having been successful, I now live and work in Italy (since June 2010). My research, funded by the European Commission, investigates European languages from an interdisciplinary perspective with the aim to expand the existing knowledge of how language influences and forms the cognitive representations of women and men of different ages. Italian, having a grammatical gender (which English doesn’t have), is an ideal language to explore the topic. My current position requires me to travel extensively within Europe in order to meet partners and fellows from the institutions involved in the project (ten universities from seven European countries). Being able to speak a few European languages, including Italian, is also an advantage.

I believe the degrees and the level of expertise obtained from the University of Nottingham have enabled me to be competitive on the job market and have allowed me to carry on my research activity in a new environment.
 

Dr Slavica Ranković

Between the years 2000 and 2005, I conducted a comparative study of the sagas of Icelanders and Serbian epic poetry at an MA and a PhD level, both degrees being supervised by the School of English and the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Nottingham. During that time the School of English and the Slavonic Studies Department have provided highly professional and intellectually challenging, but also exceptionally understanding, accommodating and supportive academic environments. All these have been essential in my being able to successfully obtain my degrees, considering that at the time I was commuting from Leeds and living on meagre means with two small children and a husband who was also a PhD student.

Beside the invaluable advice that my supervisors, Prof. Judith Jesch and Dr David Norris, have continuously offered on conducting research and writing the theses, they also made sure that I gain teaching experience and start disseminating my results both in the form of conference presentations and academic articles. Their guidance has also proven instrumental in securing my next post, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Medieval Studies in Bergen, Norway. Earlier this year (2010) I have successfully completed my Postdoctoral studies and have been employed as a Researcher at the Centre, where I continue to explore the complex ontology of traditional narratives such as the sagas and Serbian epics, their distributed authorship, the aesthetics of traditional formulas and the orality-literacy interface.
 

Dr Kevin Harvey

Prior to my pursuing higher education I had a range of jobs (each undertaken with varying degrees of enthusiasm): builder’s labourer, furniture remover, pot washer, exhibition assistant, police officer…I left school at 16 with a spectacularly unimpressive collection of GCSEs (I wasn’t academically inclined when a teenager), and entered higher education relatively late in life (27), completing an MA in Modern English Language in 2003. This was at the School of English. Afterwards, eager to pursue my research interests in health language - I’d written about the subject in my dissertation - I took up the position of research assistant in the School. During this time, I also did a spot of seminar teaching on a first year undergraduate module, Language and Context, a course which introduces lucky students to the limitless pleasures of linguistics. I adored it. Still do…

Teaching also stimulated my deep-grained desire to pursue a PhD, which I eventually did, spending three intensely stimulating and rewarding years exploring the fascinating theme of online health discourse. Upon concluding my thesis, I took up a sociolinguistic lectureship within the School.

I’ve been a lecturer for two years now. At the time of writing (September 2010), I’m currently preparing for the new Autumn semester. The leaves are beginning to turn, the nights are drawing in, and the students are on the cusp of arriving. It’s a magical, exciting time of year - both academically and seasonally – and, several years into the job, I’m still experiencing the same inimitable thrill I felt when I first started out as a full-time member of staff.

The photo of me – in a kind of semi-brown study - was taken in, of all places, Kazakhstan in June 2009. I’ve discovered that, since becoming an English lecturer, one gets to travel to, and lecture in, some astonishing locations. Indeed I’ve been fortunate enough to visit some wonderfully far-flung places: Almaty, Cape Town, Massachusetts, Lugano and Loughborough. 
   

Dr Dean Hardman

Having completed my degree in English at the University of Nottingham in 2002, I stayed to study for an MA in English between 2002 and 2003. Studying for the MA increased my interest in Modern English Language in general, while I found modules in discourse analysis and corpus linguistics particularly rewarding. My dissertation developed my research skills in these areas even further, which encouraged me to once again stay in the School of English to study for a PhD. My PhD examined political media discourse from a critical discourse analytical perspective and was completed in 2008.

As part of the experience of being research postgraduate, I did some undergraduate teaching within the school and at Loughborough University and Nottingham Trent University, which I enjoyed. When a full-time position for a Lecturer in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University was advertised, I felt that my experience of teaching and my time at Nottingham had prepared me well for a career in academia, so I applied for the post and was appointed in January 2006.