Virginia Calabria

Dr Virginia Calabria is a Research Fellow at Durham University's Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences with cross-affiliation to the Durham Research Methods Centre (DRMC) and Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH). Her work bridges linguistic anthropology and interactional sociology through rigorous multimodal analysis of naturally occurring Italian conversation.

Research focuses on collaborative grammar, emotion management, and taboo language in institutional and everyday settings. Key interests include syntactic emergence in real-time interaction, embodied resources for anger expression, swearing as social regulation, and epistemic positioning in collaborative turns. Her methodology integrates conversation analysis with detailed multimodal transcription to expose how grammar, gaze, and gesture co-construct social action.

Recent publications (2021-2025) reveal three dominant trends: (1) collaborative clause-combination in Italian talk-in-interaction, (2) linguistic and embodied management of anger/swearing in business contexts, and (3) multimodal construction of taboo topics like religious identity. Work consistently demonstrates how syntax emerges from social coordination rather than pre-existing cognitive structures.

Active in interdisciplinary networks through DRMC's methodological innovation and IMH's medical humanities initiatives, Calabria contributes to understanding emotion regulation in professional environments through linguistic lenses. Current projects examine swearing as institutional accountability mechanism and collaborative grammar in high-stakes decision-making.