معرفی
Dr Sara Whiteley is a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the School of English, University of Sheffield, a position she has held since September 2012 after teaching at the University of Chester. Her academic work bridges language and literature through empirical investigations of textual effects and reader responses.
Her research centers on stylistics, cognitive poetics, and discourse analysis, with specialization in Text World Theory applications. She examines emotional and cognitive responses to literary texts through reading group discussions, online forums, and diverse materials including Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, Outkast's 'Hey Ya!', and National Trust guestbook inscriptions. Her work pioneers socio-cognitive approaches to reader response and linguistic creativity in non-literary contexts.
Recent publications (2019-2025) reveal expanding applications of cognitive stylistics beyond traditional literature to music lyrics, tourism discourse, and identity performance. Key contributions include analyzing direct address in television, neurodiverse mind styles, and socio-cognitive dynamics in reading groups. Her work increasingly integrates corpus methods with cognitive frameworks, exemplified by her forthcoming monograph on Ishiguro.
Dr Whiteley co-investigated the British Academy funded project on National Trust guestbooks (2017-2019), co-authored the textbook 'Contemporary Stylistics' (2018), and co-edited 'The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics' (2014). She convenes postgraduate modules 'Literature of the Mind' and 'Introduction to Literary Linguistics', and welcomes PhD research in stylistics, cognitive poetics, and empirical reader response studies.
