معرفی
Dr Alison May is a Lecturer in English Language at the University of Leeds, School of English, within the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures. With a career spanning over three decades, she transitioned from a six-year tenure as a West Midlands Police officer to academia, earning a B.Ed (First Class), MA (Distinction), and PhD in Forensic Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. Her work focuses on corpus-based forensic linguistics, authorship attribution, and legal discourse analysis, with notable contributions like the Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics (co-edited) and An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics (co-authored). She has served as an expert witness in UK courts and actively engages in research on historical legal trials, police interviews, and cross-lingual stylometry.
Education: B.Ed (Primary Education with English Specialism) from the University of Birmingham (1992), MA in Special Applications of Linguistics (Distinction, 1994), and PhD in Forensic Linguistics (2005), all from the University of Birmingham. Her research explores questions in legal settings, including narrative evaluation in police interviews and medical expert roles in 19th-century insanity trials. She supervises PhD students globally, focusing on topics like Nigerian police-suspect interrogations, Arabic tweet authorship attribution, and defendant questioning in Chinese trials.
Professional Affiliations: Editor of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law; active member of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics (IAFLL) and the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). Teaching expertise includes forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis at all academic levels.
