Christopher Hart

Professor Christopher Hart is a faculty member at Lancaster University's School of Social Sciences, specializing in Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. He currently teaches courses including Language Origins and Evolution, Language Cognition and Culture, Cognitive Linguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

• Research Focus: Combines cognitive science and critical discourse analysis to study language-cognition-action links in political communication, with emphasis on migration discourse, political protest, and right-wing populism
• Methodology: Employs cognitive linguistics frameworks (conceptual metaphor, frame semantics), experimental methods, and multimodal analysis (language, images, gestures)

Hart's recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on multimodal political communication, particularly Trump's discourse and immigration representation in media. His work bridges cognitive theory with empirical testing of semiotic effects on audience perception.

He leads the Gesture in the Communicative Style of Right Wing Populism research project (2024-2026) and supervises PhD students including Noha Abdel Kader and Steve Strudwick. Hart contributes to research groups in Discourse and Text, Language Ideology and Power, and Cognitive Linguistics.