Professor Karen Corrigan, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (Chair)
Karen Corrigan is Professor of Linguistics and English Language at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University and Director of the Catherine Cookson Archive of Tyneside and Northumbrian Dialect. She was educated at University College Dublin, where she also held a research fellowship in 2009 at the John Hume Institute. Other research fellowships include those funded by the Leverhulme Trust as well as the British Council (BC)/Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam.
In addition to her individual research, she has also been the recipient of awards for a range of collaborative, externally funded projects. These include Working with Bilingual Children, an initiative supported by Humberside, Local Education Authority that focused on best practice in the education of bilingual children in Britain’s primary schools and resulted in a book of the same name published in 1995 by Multilingual Matters. Karen has also worked collaboratively on interdisciplinary research funded by the National Health Service which sought to use linguistic tools to more rapidly diagnose patients presenting with Borderline Personality Disorder. Recent large-scale and collaborative projects which she has also led have focused on documenting and archiving the linguistic history of dialectal English in North Eastern England, culminating in the creation of three websites where both legacy and contemporary text, sound and image files relating to these distinctive varieties can be downloaded (see http://research.ncl.ac.uk/necte/; http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/; http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon/). As well as numerous papers in journals and edited works, there have been two volumes entitled Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora (Palgrave, 2007) associated with these Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded projects.
The interrelationship between syntax and variation has been an enduring research interest of Karen’s since her days as a doctoral student at University College Dublin and she continues to research and publish in this field alongside her contributions to corpus linguistics. Her book with Leonie Cornips (John Benjamins, 2005) arising from their BC/NWO exchange fellowship programme entitled Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social is an important landmark in the development of the recent sub-field of linguistics known as ‘Socio-Syntax’. This research programme is closely linked to her interests in Irish-English, an area that she has published in for the last twenty years. The award of an AHRC fellowship in 2008 to conduct new fieldwork in Northern Ireland under the auspices of her The Empire Speaks Back project resulted in a monograph: Irish English, Volume 1: Northern Ireland (EUP, 2010). Karen also used this research opportunity to undertake various public engagement initiatives at local primary and secondary schools in addition to a public lecture at the Centre for Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park, Omagh (http://www.qub.ac.uk/cms/).