My PhD (Leeds) was in stylistics of newspapers, and my first book (Jeffries 1993) was on the stylistics of poetry. I joined the University in 1989 and was Head of English before being appointed to the Research Coordinator post in 2005 and to the Chair of English Language and Linguistics in 2007. I have been Chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and was organiser of the 25th annual conference of PALA in 2005 editing the proceedings (Rodopi 2007) with two colleagues, Dan McIntyre and Derek Bousfield. I am the series editor (with Dan McIntyre) of the Perspectives on the English Language series for Palgrave and a member of the editorial board of the journals Language and Literature (Sage) and English Text Construction (Benjamins). I supervise PhD students on topics in stylistics and critical stylistics ranging from contemporary poetry to political discourse. I have been awarded grant funding from the AHRC for a sabbatical in 2005-6, as Co-I for the SAMUELS project(AH/L010062/1) in 2014-15 and for follow-on funding for the Hansard at Huddersfield project (AHR007136/1) in 2018-19. I am the Director of the Centre for Applied Linguistics.

• Critical stylistics
• Language in conflict
• Stylistics of poetry
• Language in the news
• Corpus approaches to stylistics