Dr Clara Neary | University of Chester

Senior Lecturer in English Language

Dr Clara Neary is a Senior Lecturer in English Language in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Chester. She was Programme Leader for Combined and then Single Hons undergraduate English Language programmes from 2017 to 2022. She is also currently a Research Impact Fellow at Queen's University Belfast where she is working on an AHRC-funded project "Still Reading: enabling people with dementia to enjoy shared reading" with Dr Jane Lugea (from March 2024). Clara's academic research is interdisciplinary, amalgamating content from her degrees in Psychology, English Language and English Literature, and her methodological approaches are wide-ranging, including the qualitative and the quantitative and encompassing the use of modern linguistic techniques such as corpus linguistics and digital modes of communication. She has been a member of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) since 2007 and is currently a member of the Executive Committee in the role of Publicity Officer (2023-2026). She is also a member of the AHRC-funded 'Cognitive Futures in the Humanities' Network (2013 - present). She has recent been invited to join the Editorial Committee for Cambridge University Press's new 'Cambridge Elements in Stylistics' series.

Dr Neary teaches at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the inter-related areas of Stylistics and Discourse Analysis, both of which focus on the linguistic construction of a text and how it creates meaning. Her particular specialism is in Cognitive Stylistics, an interdisciplinary field which draws upon Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Linguistics, English Language and Literary Studies to investigate the rhetorical and emotional effects of a text’s linguistic construction. She also teaches on the nature of textual creativity; language and power; research methods; and contemporary issues in English Language and Linguistics. She supervises UG and PG dissertations in Discourse Analysis and Stylistics. She has been on the supervisory teams of six PhD candidates, in areas including Stylistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Relevance Theory, and is currently secondary supervisor on a PhD in collaboration with the University of Chester's Department of Public Health.

Clara's research interests are interdisciplinary in nature and incorporate the areas of Stylistics / Cognitive Stylistics; Discourse Analysis; Indian Literature in English; Postcolonial/Global Literatures; and Life-Writing. Her published work applies a range of stylistic and cognitive stylistic frameworks – including corpus stylistics, point of view and modality, narrative empathy, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Cognitive Grammar – to a variety of differing text types. Recent projects include the application of cognitive stylistics and cognitive psychology to popular music; and researching metaphor use in religious and postcolonial contexts; while her current projects include critical discourse and multimodal analysis of local tourism discourse; multimodal stylistic analysis of literary and televisual texts; and eco-linguistic approaches to postcolonial literature. She is also currently laying the groundwork for a large-scale project on Stylistics and healthcare.

Neary, C. (2021). '"All The Figures I Used to See": Using Cognitive Grammar to Grapple With Rhythmic and Intertextual Meaning-making in Radiohead's "Pyramid Song"'. In Giovanelli, M., Harrison, C. and Nuttall, L. (eds) New Directions in Cognitive Grammar and Style. London: Bloomsbury.

Neary, C. (2019) Book review: The Language of Jane Austen by Joe Bray, 2018. London: Palgrave: pp. 182 ISBN 9783319721613. Language and Literature 28(2).

Neary, C. (2019) '"Please could you stop the noise": the grammar of multimodal meaning-making in Radiohead's "Paranoid Android". Language and Literature 28(1), 41-60.

Neary, C. (2018) Review: Fire metaphors: Discourses of Awe and Authority by J. Charteris-Black. Metaphor and the Social World, 8(2), 319-325.

Neary, C. and Ringrow, H. (2018). “Media English”. In Seargeant, P., Hewings, A., & Pihlaja, S. (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies. London: Routledge.

Neary, C. (2017) Gandhi’s autobiography: self-promotion down to a fine art”. The Irish Times, 15th August 2017.

Neary, C. (2017) ‘“Truth is like a vast tree”: Metaphor use in Gandhi’s autobiographical narration’. Metaphor and the Social World, 7(1), 103 –121.

Neary, C. (2014) ‘Profiling the Flight of ‘The Windhover’. In Harrison, C., Nuttall, L., Stockwell, P. and Yuan, W. (eds) Cognitive Grammar in Literature. Linguistic Approaches to Literature Series. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Neary, C. (2014) ‘Stylistics, Point of View and Modality’. In M. Burke (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. London: Routledge.

Neary, C. (2014) ‘Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments with Truth(1940)’. The Literary Encyclopedia.

Neary, C. (2010) ‘Negotiating Narrative Empathy in Gandhi's Life-Writing.’ Presented at PALA 2010 ‘The Language of Landscapes’ Conference: July 2010. Published as part of Online Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA).

Neary, C. (2009) ‘Gandhi’s “Split Selves”: Experimenting with Experiments with Truth (1945).’ Presented at PALA 2009 ‘The Art of Stylistics’ Conference: July 2009, Middelburg, Netherlands. [Awarded the 2010 Longman Prize for Best Student Research Paper]. Published as part of Online Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA). 2009.

Conference Papers / Presentations

“‘You grind, Miss Dempsey. You measure. You moisten. You heat. You filter.”: coffee and the alchemy of metaphor in Hilary Mantel's Fludd (1989)”. International Association of Literary Semantics Conference 2021: University of Vilnius, Lithuania, 22-24 Oct. 2021. (Collaboration with Dr Eileen Pollard, Manchester Metropolitan University).

“‘When we say the night has a velvet darkness, we romance. When we say the soul is black, we are turning a phrase’: metaphors of matter and metaphors that matter in Hilary Mantel’s Fludd (1989)”. PALA 2021 Conference: University of Nottingham, 7-9 July 2021. (Collaboration with Dr Eileen Pollard, Manchester Metropolitan University).

“‘It is the curse of the present century, this rage for oversimplification’ ”: The complexity of metaphor, alchemy and Catholicism in Hilary Mantel's Fludd (1989)”. Catholicism and Literary Culture in Scotland, Ireland, and England: Medieval to Modern: A Symposium: University of Glasgow, 1-2 June 2021. (Collaboration with Dr Eileen Pollard, Manchester Metropolitan University).

“All the figures I used to see”: using Cognitive Grammar to grapple with rhythmic and intertextual meaning-making in Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”. PALA 2019 ‘Stylistics without Borders’ Conference: University of Liverpool, July 2019.

“There was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt”: how words and music make meaning in Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song”. Cognitive Grammar in Stylistics Symposium, Aston University, Sept. 2018.

“Please could you stop the noise”: the grammar of multimodal meaning-making in Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”. PALA 2018 ‘Styles and Methods’ Conference: University of Birmingham, July 2018.

‘The grammar of multimodal meaning-making in Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android”. University of Chester Departmental Research Seminar, March 2018.

‘Text, Intertext, Paratext: The Creative Text Worlds of Sterne's Tristram Shandy’. Collaboration with Prof. Derek Alsop. PALA 2015 ‘Creative Style’ Conference: University of Kent, Canterbury, July 2015.

‘Testing Text World Theory: Tristram Shandy.’ Collaboration with Prof. Derek Alsop. University of Chester Departmental Research Seminar, April 2015.

‘“the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!’ Using Cognitive Grammar to pin down “The Windhover”’. Cognitive Futures in the Humanities 2015 ‘Forging Futures from the Past: History and Cognition’: University of Oxford, April 2015.

‘Buckle! A Cognitive Grammar profile of Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover’’. PALA 2014 ‘Everybody’s Got Style! Testing the Boundaries of Contemporary Stylistics’ Conference: July 2014, University of Maribor, Slovenia.

‘Religious and Stylistic Mobility: Using Cognitive Metaphor Theory to uproot “the canker of untruth” in Gandhi’s autobiography.’ PALA 2013 ‘Mobile Stylistics’ Conference: July 2013, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

‘“To love the meanest of creation as oneself”: Empathetic engagement with Gandhi: a cogni-corpus stylistic approach.’ University of Huddersfield Departmental Research Seminar, 24th April 2013.

‘Empathetic Engagement with the life-writing of M.K. Gandhi: a cognitive and corpus stylistic analysis.’ Cognitive Futures in the Humanities 2013: Bangor University, 4th – 6th April 2013.

‘Taking a gander at Gandhi: a cognitive stylistic analysis of The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1940).’ University of Chester Departmental Research Seminar, March 2013.

‘“The canker of untruth”: Exploring Metaphor Use in Gandhi’s Life-Writing’. ILinC 2011 ‘Crossing Boundaries: The Impact of Language Studies in Academia and Beyond’ Conference: Oct 2011, Queen’s University Belfast.

‘Negotiating Narrative Empathy in Gandhi's Life-Writing.’ PALA 2010 ‘The Language of Landscapes’ Conference: July 2010, University of Genoa, Italy.

‘Experimenting with Identity in Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1945).’ ‘Framing the Self: Anxieties of Identity in Literature and Culture, 1800 to the present day' Conference: University of Portsmouth, May 2010.

Peer reviewer

Routledge
Metaphor and the Social World
Language and Literature
Open Linguistics
Humanities
Palgrave
Cambridge University Press
Sage Open

BSc Psychology
BA, MA, PhD English (Queen’s University Belfast)
PGC Learning and Teaching (HE)
FHEA
Level 2 Certificate in Mental Health Awareness