Fiona Douglas

Professor Fiona Douglas is a Professor of English Language at the School of English, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures, University of Leeds. She joined the university in 2003 after working as a Research Assistant for the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech at the University of Glasgow. Her work focuses on dialectology, corpus linguistics, and the relationship between language and identity.

Her educational background includes an MA and PhD from the University of Glasgow, where her doctoral research focused on "The role of lexis in Scottish Newspapers."

Professor Douglas's research spans dialectology/sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and digital humanities. She specializes in English dialects (particularly in England and Scotland) and the connection between language and identity. Much of her work is corpus-based with a lexical focus across various text and discourse types. She has built several specialist corpora focusing on dialects, media language, and public/political discourses, with notable publications including "Scottish Newspapers, Language and Identity" (2009) and "Political, Public and Media Discourses from Indyref to Brexit" (2021).

Her publications reveal a consistent thread examining how language reflects and shapes regional and national identities, with methodological approaches combining corpus linguistics with sociolinguistic analysis to uncover linguistic patterns.

Her notable achievements include:

• University of Leeds Teaching Fellowship (2009)
• Membership on the 2015 QAA English Subject Benchmark Statement Committee
• Extensive media engagement across BBC platforms and national/international publications
• Development of the Dialect and Heritage Project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund

Professor Douglas has supervised numerous graduate students on diverse topics including political discourse and dialect studies. She currently leads the Dialect and Heritage Project collaborating with five museums to engage the public with dialect research. Her educational leadership includes serving as Director of Student Education in the School of English from 2019-2022, and she has developed innovative pedagogical opportunities allowing students to participate as "mini-researchers" whose work is showcased in museum environments.