Sumin Zhao

Lecturer

Biography

Background

I received my academic training as a text linguist in the Hallidayan tradition at the University of Sydney. My areas of expertise include Discourse Analysis (multimodal & critical), Social Semiotics, and Systemic Functional Grammar.

Prior to joining Edinburgh, I held the Carlsberg Distinguished Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Southern Denmark (2016-2018) and the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Technology Sydney (2013-2016). I was a visiting research associate at UCL Institute of Education in 2015 and 2016. 

I am a speaker of Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese. 

 

Undergraduate teaching

I teach DA-related topics in the following courses in the 2020-21 academic year. 

 

LEL 1A (pre-honours): Discourse Analysis 

Pragmatics (honors/MSc): Applying coherence theory in clinical settings

I am the course organizer for Discourse Analysis (Honors & MSc).  

 

 

Postgraduate teaching

Please refer to UG teaching information above. 

 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I have limited supervision capacity at the moment, so I would only be able to supervise PhD topics on video-sharing platforms and multimodality. 

I also accept PhD applications through the CDT-NPL doctoral training programme https://web.inf.ed.ac.uk/cdt/natural-language-processing/people/cdt-nlp-supervisory-teams

 

 

 

 

Current PhD students supervised

  • Tiffany Pang (co) The online discourses of "Princess Syndrome" in the Taiwanese context
  • Andre Theng  (Lead) Social media and the catholic church
  • Alexandera Sevastynova (Lead)  Russian speaking influencers and mental health discourse 
  • Bonnie Liu (Lead) Professional and gender identities of Taiwanese Youtube vloggers
  • Humin Xiu (Advisory Board, National Insitute of Education, Singapore) Laowai micro-influencers on Chinese social media
  • J R Wells (second)
  • Natalie Lau (second, SPS)

Research summary

  • Digital literacies and multimodal practices of young children: the design and use of mobile applications in the early childhood context, digital literacy practices of immigrant families with young children, picture books and transnational text flows
  • Multimodality and social media discourses: selfies and digital genres, the discourses of childhood & motherhood, technology-mediated multimodal interaction

You can find a list of my publications here, https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OWSe9m4AAAAJ&hl=enc

 

Knowledge exchange

  • I am an editor for Functions of Language (https://benjamins.com/catalog/fol) and serves on the editorial board of Frontiers in Communication. 
  • I am the convenor of BAAL SIG Language & New Media. https://baallangnewmedia.wordpress.com/ 
  • I am a member of the International Collective of Research and Design in Children's Digital Books. www.childrensdigitalbooks.com
  • I participate in the COST DigiLiTEY action (www.digilitey.eu) and acted as the Danish representative in 2017 and 2018.

Research activities

View all 45 activities on Research Explorer

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