Pauline Madella, PhD

An academic’s update

Happy first full moon of 2025! Time for an update. 2025 is here, and with it come a number of exciting collective projects, initiated in 2024:

~ This includes the development of the new Bloomsbury Handbook of Pragmatics, Prosody, and Gesture Studies, co-edited with my dear friend, Mary Edward (McMaster Uni., CA). More details on this will be communicated soon!

~ The organisation of our IPRA2025 – 19th International Pragmatics conference – panel Navigating Media Discourse: Communication, Cognition and Affect is being finalised. We cannot wait to see the final programme including the pre-conference workshops. I will be presenting on the descriptive ineffability of verbal sarcasm in TV sitcom Friends: where cognitive and interactional pragmatics meet.

~ This coming semester, I start teaching Forensic Linguistics (at Level 6), and I could not be more psyched about it. I have loved developing the content of the module based on fascinating reading and insightful materials including notorious criminal cases and recent developments in the field, and our work on detecting the pragmatics of manipulation in the online grooming ‘genre’ (Pienczykowski & Madella, 2024).

More to follow ~ ~ ~