Laura Coffey-Glover

Role
Dr Coffey-Glover teaches in the School of Arts and Humanities within the subject area of Linguistics. She mainly teaches in the areas of phonetics, discourse analysis and language, gender and sexuality.

Career overview
Laura started at NTU in September 2016, having previously taught English Language and Linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University, as well as the Universities of Manchester, Edge Hill, Liverpool Hope and Huddersfield, where she gained her PhD on constructions of masculinity in women’s magazines.

Research areas
Dr Coffey-Glover is a member of the Inequality, Culture and Difference research centre.

Her main interests are in the area of language, gender and sexuality.

Specifically, Dr Coffey-Glover’s work combines corpus linguistic methods with critical discourse analytical and queer linguistic approaches to gender identity. She is particularly interested in constructions and representations of gender and sexuality in the mass media, and she is currently writing a book on ideologies of masculinity in women’s magazines for Palgrave Macmillan.

Dr Coffey-Glover is also involved in several collaborative projects with the Discourses of Marriage Research Group, a small network of scholars in the UK interested in the ways in which marriage, and particular same-sex marriage, is talked about in the media. In this group we have undertaken projects which critically analyse implicit homophobia in debates about same-sex marriage in broadcast and print media, and we are currently organising a seminar on Discourses of Marriage funded by the British Association of Applied Linguistics and Cambridge University Press, to be held in autumn 2017 at the University of Liverpool.

She has also undertaken collaborative research on audience responses to the song and video for the infamous 2013 summer smash hit Blurred Lines, which at the time received criticism from various feminist groups and was banned on some university campuses for its ‘controversial’ content. The project analyses responses to the song in order to better understand the linguistic strategies people use in their interpretations of sexist language practices.

Dr Coffey-Glover welcomes applications to carry out postgraduate research in any area of language, gender and sexuality, but particularly welcomes applications to supervise projects which combine corpus linguistic and critical discourse/queer linguistic approaches to gender/sexual identity.

External activity
Dr Coffey-Glover is on the editorial board for the Journal of Language and Discrimination and is a member of the Discourses of Marriage research group, a small network of scholars in the UK interested in the ways in which marriage, and particular same-sex marriage, is talked about in the media. She also regularly presents her work at national and international conferences.