About

I am an Associate Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business in Austria (Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, WU). There, I am a member of the Institute for English Business Communication, Deputy Head of the Institute for Communication Management and Media, as well as Second Deputy Head of the WU Senate. Before joining WU, I held academic positions at Birmingham City University, UK, as well as the University of Vienna, Austria.

My research and teaching are infused by the foundational role that language and communication play in our everyday lives and in particular in business practice.

My core research interests include business communication, discourse studies and pragmatics. I therefore mainly investigate ‘language in use’ in a variety of contexts, such as customer communication, and the discursive effects that are created as a consequence of the linguistic choices speakers and writers make. In my studies, I often use a corpus linguistic methodology, which means that I usually search big data collections for linguistic patterns and trends. My recent work has focused on the study of large corpora of digital discourse, such as blogs and microblogs. My monograph, The Discourse of Customer Service Tweets (2021, Bloomsbury), explores the linguistic and communicative features used by companies and their customers when engaging in customer service interactions on Twitter.

My teaching is greatly informed by my research activities. I have taught classes at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, and I have been involved in PhD supervision as well as examination at different universities in Europe, including Liverpool, Lund and Ghent. I am also a Senior Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy. At WU, I hold the core lecture “Introduction to Business Communication”, and I teach key areas of study, such as branding and crisis communication, as part of the BA Specialization in “International Business Communication”. Currently, I am involved in designing the curriculum of the new WU Master’s program on “Business Communication”, which will launch in September 2022.