Dr Paul Flanagan
Senior Lecturer
Biography
Dr Paul Flanagan is Senior Lecturer in English Language in the Division of Communication, Screen and Performance, and Programme Leader for the BA English Language (Single Hons). Paul teaches across all English Language programmes, including the MA English Language and Linguistics, and is subject lead for Outreach, developing and maintaining links with schools and colleges in the local area and beyond. Paul is also subject lead on Careers and Employability, working alongside our careers team and employer engagement professionals to establish working relationships with industry partners, and maximising opportunities for students to engage with their career journeys during and after their studies. He teaches and researches across a range of subject areas on English Language programmes, with particular specialisms in the language of pop culture, history of English, and linguistic typology.
Teaching and Supervision
Paul has taught across four HEIs in north-west Britain, joining the University of Chester in 2015. He teaches a range of subject areas, from sociolinguistics and the language of popular culture, to the history of English, discourse analysis, and core linguistic theory. He enjoys teaching language typology, using examples from over 120 languages on his modules, while also covering applications of lingustic knowledge such as in the teaching of English as an Additional Language (EAL), British Sign Language (BSL), conlanging (the construction of artificial languages), and language documentation. Paul has also supervised research and taught research methodology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels on various diverse subject areas in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and discourse analysis, and on multiple different languages, including Norwegian, Nigerian Pidgin, and Igbo. Paul is passionate about making students aware of the transferability of their academic skills, and practices the use of authentic assessments (such as commercial-syle blogs with workshops from industry partners), and rigorous, inclusive assessments with a range of options in terms of mode of delivery (essays, presentations, videos and podcasts). Paul delivers one of his seminars every year in BSL, and also co-ordinates the English at Work module, in which students combine arranged placements in relevant industry settings with talks by guest speakers designed to help improve their confidence in developing their employability.
Research and Knowledge Exchange
Paul's research is quite diverse, with a range of inter-disciplinary focuses. His early research was in linguistic typology, with a fielwork and corpus-based PhD studying the order of attributive adjectives across six different language families, working with Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Tagalog, Welsh, and Northern Sotho, for which he conducted data collection in rural Limpopo, South Africa. His focus has since moved on to the language of pop culture, with work on the language of British indie bands (Arctic Monkeys, Manic Street Preachers and Pulp) and multimodal studies of the language of film and television (Game of Thrones; the BFG films). In 2023, Paul became co-Editor-in-Chief of a brand new journal with John Benjamins: The Journal of Language and Pop Culture, which is the first academic journal specialising on this subject area. Paul is also co-principal investigator on the Learn Old English project: a research and web development project investigating and supporting the digital teaching and learning of Old English.