Staff in Modern Languages and Linguistics

Professor Raffaella Folli

Research Director - Modern Languages & Linguistics

Professor Raffaella Folli studied Philosophy at the University of Milan. In 1998 she completed an MPhil in Linguistics at the University of Oxford and in 2001 a DPhil in Linguistics, also at the University of Oxford. She joined Ulster University in 2005 having previously held research positions at the University of Arizona and then the University of Cambridge. Her main research area is theoretical syntax. Her standing in linguistics is evidenced by her extensive publications in top journals in the field, various grants from different research councils and extensive collaborations with academics in the UK and the US. In 2011 she was awarded a Distinguished Research Fellowship award in recognition of her research achievements.

Raffaella is part of the linguistics team that in 2012 established the Ulster Centre on Multilingualism (UCoM), an information service for people raising or working with children growing up with more than one language.

Caroline Harkin

Project Co-ordinator

Dr Niall Comer

Lecturer in Irish

Professor Maxim Fomin

Professor of Celtic Studies, Digital Humanities & Irish Folklore

Dr Maxim Fomin gained his Masters degree in Philosophy from Moscow State University in 1998. He also worked for a PhD in Early and Medieval Irish from University College Cork between 2000-2003.

Research Fields

Early Irish wisdom and legal literature, history of Irish language literary tradition, Irish folklore and calendar festivals, Celto-Slavic parallels in language, medieval narrative literature and folklore, Irish-Indian connections and cultural parallels, comparative mythology and historical poetics, comparative linguistics, digitisation and linguistic computing in Celtic Studies, bibliography of Celtic scholars in the XIXth century.

Professional Affiliations

The Learned Association Societas Celto-Slavica, Secretary, Founding Member and General Editor of Studia Celto-Slavica series, AHRC Peer-Review College Member, Irish Humanities Alliance Executive Board Member, Centre for Research in Breton and Celtic (Brest, France), Visiting Professor

Dr Art Hughes

Reader

Dr Art Hughes is Reader in Irish. In 2009-2010, he was Visiting Professor and Senior Fulbright Scholar, Ireland House, at New York University.

In 1999, he was appointed Lecturer in Irish language and Literature at Ulster University. He was Lecturer in Institute of Irish Studies Queen's University Belfast and Armagh in 1995-98.

He is also chair of the McCracken Cultural Society, Belfast and contributor on a sporadic basis to radio and television programmes on Irish-language related topics.

Research Fields

Old Irish to modern pan-Gaelic dialects; phonetics, Old, Early Modern and Modern Gaelic literature.

Dr Nioclas Mac Cathmhaoil

Lecturer in Irish

Dr Gearoid O Domagain

Lecturer in Modern Irish

Dr Gearóid Ó Domagáin studied Irish Language and Literature at Ulster University where he graduated with a 1st class honours degree in 2005.

He then completed a PhD in 2009 with a study of linguistic contact and change in the Donegal Gaeltacht.

During his PhD study he undertook a part-time teaching and research role at Ulster. Since then he has worked as an RCUK Research Fellow in Lexicography (2009 - 2011) and as an Academic Fellow in Irish and Celtic Studies (2011 - present) with his main duties being the compilation and editing of the Collins Concise English/Irish - Irish/English Dictionary.

His main research interests lie in lexicography, language standardisation, contact linguistics, language change and sociolinguistics.

Dr Caoimhin O Donaill

Senior Lecturer

Dr Caoimhín Ó Dónaill studied Early and Modern Irish at Trinity College Dublin before completing a Higher Diploma in Education (1999) and a doctorate in (2004) at the same institution.

He was appointed to a Lectureship in the Research Institute for Irish and Celtic Studies in 2007 having previously held the positions of Language Technologist within the Centre for Excellence in Multimedia Language Learning (2005-2007), Research Associate on the Linking Dictionaries and Texts Project (2004-2005) and Research Assistant on the Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language Project (2003-2004).

Prior to this, he held various teaching roles at Trinity College Dublin, Froebel College of Education, Blackrock and Coláiste Eoin, Booterstown, Co. Dublin.

From 2000-2003 he held a Government of Ireland Scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

He is a member of an Mheitheal um Theagasc na Gaeilge and local Coordinator for the EACEA funded "Tools for CLIL Teachers' project, and is a Fellow of Ulster's Centre for Higher Education Practice. His research interests include Early Irish Language and Literature, Computer Assisted Language Learning and Task-Based Language Learning.

Dr Frank Sewell

Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Irish Literature in English

Dr Frank Sewell's PhD research into the poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Cathal Ó Searcaigh and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was published as a monograph by Oxford University Press: Modern Irish Poetry: A New Alhambra (Oxford: OUP, 2000).

Since then he has continued to write chapters and essays on the 'dual tradition' of twentieth-century Irish poetry in both English and Irish, including studies of work by Gabriel Rosenstock and Ciaran Carson.

Other publications include translations of Irish poetry and short stories, Japanese poetry, and also original poetry. In addition Frank has edited several anthologies of contemporary writing.

Education

1998 PhD, Irish poetry, Ulster University; 1992 BA Hons 1st Class: English (major) & Russian (minor)

Research Fields

Poetry
Modern and contemporary writing in Irish
Bilingual writing in Ireland
Creative writing
Translation
International aspects of Irish Literature (esp. Russian / Slavonic links)

Dr Peter Smith

Reader

Peter Smith (Peadar Mac Gabhann) was appointed Lecturer in Irish at Ulster University in 2000.

He was previously employed as Assistant Professor in Irish at the Department of Classics and as a Research Fellow in Irish Studies at the Keough Institute, University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Before moving to the United States, Dr. Smith held the position of Lecturer in Celtic at the Sprachwissenschaftfliches Institut der Universität Bonn.

He is a founding member of Éigse Cholm Cille, a society established to promote the study of the Irish literary heritage of the North West of Ireland and to encourage new writing in Irish.

Education

He received his early education at the Christian Brothers Grammar School Omagh, and took his primary degree in Early and Modern Irish at Trinity College, Dublin. He also completed an M. Litt. in Early Irish at Trinity College, Dublin.

He studied for his doctorate in Celtic at the University of Oxford. Dr. Smith has held scholarships at Trinity College, Dublin; Jesus College, Oxford and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

Research Fields

The Irish manuscript tradition.

Reihaneh Afshari Saleh

Lecturer in Language & Communication

Dr Juliana Gerard

Lecturer

Juliana Gerard joined the School of Communication in 2016. Her research and teaching interests are in language acquisition and language processing in children and adults. Her work has focused on how processes that are not specific to language, like memory and inhibitory control, can influence children’s language development.

Juliana studied linguistics and cognitive science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated summa cum laude with concurrent bachelors and masters degrees. She then moved to Maryland to pursue a PhD in linguistics, specialising in children's language acquisition, and finally to Ulster as a Lecturer in linguistics.

Dr Anthea Irwin

Lecturer

Anthea joined the School of Communication in 2013 from Glasgow Caledonian University. She holds a first class honours degree in English Studies from the University of Stirling, a MA with distinction in Linguistics from Durham University, and a PhD from the University of Surrey Roehampton. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Anthea has applied her main research interest of power and identity in discourse to a range of fields, publishing journal articles and book chapters on adolescent interaction; media constructions of young people, asylum seekers, poverty, minority languages, and political events; and gender and leadership in UK politics.  

Her current research explores the post-conflict identities of adult learners of Irish in Northern Ireland. Anthea has reviewed for a range of publishers. She is a member of the organising committee for the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) Conference 2017 and was a joint recipient of the 2015 Belfast Ambassador of the Year award in that role.  

Anthea teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the School, in the areas of Communication Studies, Language and Media Analysis, Writing for the Communication Industries, and Research Methods, and she acts as a PhD supervisor. She has held external examining posts at Goldsmith’s and Forth Valley College.

Anthea is keen to make her research relevant to students and communities. She has made a range of contributions to student-facing books in the areas of Sociolinguistics and Language and Media, and she is a regular contributor to the ESRC Festival of Social Science.

Balthazar Lauzon

Lecturer in Linguistics

Dr Catrin Rhys

Head of School of Communication and Media

Dr Catrin S. Rhys is Head of School in the School of Communication and Media and a Senior Lecturer in linguistics. She joined the university in 1995 after an ESRC funded PhD in Chinese Syntax from the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Edinburgh and lecturing posts in York University and the University of Leon, Spain.

Dr Rhys’ research employs Conversation Analysis to examine language and social interaction in a range of different institutional and mundane settings. Her NIHR funded Real Complaints project, in collaboration with Bethan Benwell, focuses on the role of communication in complaints handling in the NHS, using conversation analysis to understand the longitudinal experience of complaining and to provide training materials for healthcare professionals handling complaints.

Dr Christina Sevdali

Senior Lecturer

Life Before Ulster

Dr Christina Sevdali was born in Greece and obtained her Bachelor’s Degree in Greek Philology with a major in Linguistics from the University of Crete in 2000. In 2002 she obtained her MPhil in theoretical linguistics from the University of Cambridge and then moved on to do a PhD, which she obtained in 2007.

Her PhD dissertation ‘Infinitival clauses in Ancient Greek: overt and null subjects, the role of Case and Focus’ from the University of Cambridge, supervised by Ian Roberts, investigates the challenging interaction between the Accusativus cum Infinitivo construction and control in Ancient Greek. During her PhD, Christina also spent a semester at MIT as a visiting student, working with Sabine Iatridou.

Teaching

Christina is the Course Director of the Language and Linguistics degree at the School of Communication and Media and teaches linguistic modules in both the undergraduate and the postgraduate provision.

Her teaching centres around morphology, syntax as well as historical linguistics. She has supervised PhD dissertations on the syntax of Irish noun phrases, trilingualism, dialects, aphasia, as well as Greek diachrony, bilingualism and acquisition of case.

Research

Christina’s research interests include synchronic and diachronic syntax, Greek linguistics, syntax – morphology interface and multilingualism. More specifically she is interested in finiteness and its relationship to subjects, the theory of Control and specifically Partial Control, Case/case in synchrony and diachrony especially in relation to phenomena such as focus and emphasis, datives and quirky subjects, object drop and cognate objects and the diachrony of complementation.

In 2017, she secured an AHRC grant alongside Professor Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete) on “Investigating Variation and Change: Case in diachrony.” The project looks into on the diachrony of the Greek case system, with particular focus on dative and genitive and, couched within the generative framework, it aims to contribute to the question of the place of case in grammar, as a phenomenon that relates to both syntax and morphology.

Christina has published in leading journals of the field such as Language, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Syntax, Lingua, Journal of Historical Syntax, Lingue e Linguaggi, Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics and the Proceedings of NELS. She also co-edited an Oxford University Press volume “Syntax and its limits”, with Raffella Folli (Ulster University) and Robert Truswell (University of Edinburgh).

Civic Roles

Christina is a member of UCoM (Ulster Centre on Multilingualism) and leads the Language made fun project, in collaboration with Barnardo’s NI.

This project, funded by the Lottery trust, aims to assist children of refugees and asylum seekers with their English while also promoting multilingualism.

Dr Karyn Stapleton

Senior Lecturer

Life Before Ulster

Dr Karyn Stapleton studied at Ulster University in 1999 gaining BSc Hons Communication (1st class), School of Communication, Ulster; 2002: PhD in Communication and Psychology (discourse, identity, ISA), School of Communication and Psychology; Ulster

Teaching

Karyn is Senior Lecturer in Communication.

Since 2015, she has been a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Her areas of teaching are:

• Interpersonal Communication
• Social Psychology
• Group Psychology
• Language and Interaction

Research

Karyn’s research interests are in interpersonal communication, discourse analysis, swearing, social psychology, and identity construction and management. Recent research publications have included articles on: interpersonal accountability, swearing, cognitive dissonance, public apology, women’s identities in conflict contexts, and narrative theory.

She has published widely in key international journals, including Discourse & Society, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Identities, Organization, Language in Society. She was a contributor to the Handbook of Pragmatics (de Gruyter, 2010).

She has co-edited Devolution and Identity (Ashgate/Routledge 2006/2017, with John Wilson) and Advances in Swearing Research (Benjamins 2017, with Kristy Beers Fägersten). Karyn has co-supervised four PhDs to completion and is currently co-supervising four PhDs in applied areas of communication. All of her research is concerned with how discourse and interpersonal interaction relate to other psychological, cultural, and social phenomena.

Civic Roles

Karyn is currently (joint) Vice-Chair of the Interpersonal Communication and Social Interaction (ICSI) section of the European Communication Research and Education Association. She also holds professional membership of the British Psychological Society, the International Pragmatics Association, the International Communication Association, and the International Association of Language and Social Psychology.

She was a member of a Royal Irish Academy multidisciplinary committee (2014-2017).

Karyn was a member of the Organising Committee for the 15th International Pragmatics Association Conference (Belfast, 2017); and of the Organising Committees for ICSI conferences (2011, Belfast, Northern Ireland; 2019, Tilburg, Netherlands).  She is a reviewer for a number of journals and conferences and regularly presents her work at international conferences. In 2017, she was the Keynote Speaker at The 5th Swearing in Scandinavia Symposium, Helsinki, Finland. She has been External Examiner at ITT, Dublin (until 2017), Manchester Metropolitan University (2012-2016) and Birkbeck College, University of London (2018).

Dr Richard Stockwell

Lecturer in Linguistics

Victoria Singer

Lecturer in Speech and Language Therapy

Dr Xiuping Li

Lecturer in Chinese

Professor Philip McDermott

Professor of Sociology

Philip McDermott is Professor of Sociology with teaching interests in the areas of Irish society, cultural and media studies, and social research methods. He acquired Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) in 2018. He was also awarded Ulster University’s Distinguished Research Fellowship for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in 2022.

Philip teaches on the undergraduate programme in Sociology on the Belfast Campus and on the ‘Patients, Populations and Society’ Strand of the Graduate Entry Medical School.

His research is concerned with the relationship between the state and the heritage of minority groups – especially migrant and linguistic minorities.

He is particularly interested in the intersection between social policy and cultural heritage policy as a space for empowerment.

A further strand of Philip’s work relates to language and identity in public settings. He has an interest in the perception of migrant languages in public places and the ways that government and communities deal with linguistic diversity.

Philip has presented at multiple international conferences, including keynote presentations at UCL, Cambridge and Humak University (Helsinki). His 55+ publications include a monograph, several edited collections and book chapters. His research has appeared in high impact international peer reviewed journals.

Professor McDermott served a term as editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology (Sage) (2020-2023) and is currently an editor of the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (Berghahn).

Philip’s research has been funded by the British Academy, the National Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). He held a prestigious Charlemont Scholarship from the Royal Irish Academy (2015-16).

His international esteem is evidenced by his roles as an independent expert for the European Commission (Horizon), the National Research Council of Poland and the Velux Foundation, Denmark.

His research continues to be impact focused. In 2024, with Professor Patricia Lundy (Sociology) he organised a major international symposium at Ulster University to explore ‘heritage activism and difficult pasts’ funded by the AHRC IAA Stream.

He continues to work closely with several NGOs representing migrant populations in Northern Ireland.

For this civic work, Professor McDermott was awarded a Breaking Barriers award at the 2021 NI Advancing Racial Equality Awards. In 2023, he was elected as a board member of Northwest Migrants Forum a leading community organisation representing migrant communities in the wider Derry Area.

Dr Morgan Macleod

Research Associate