Sumin Zhao
Lecturer
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences
Contact details
- Tel: 0131 651 5513
- Email: sumin.zhao@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 2.03, Dugald Stewart Building
- City
- 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AD
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 am currently teaching one module for LEL 1A: Discourse in Everday life.
I am also developing a new honours course on Discourse Analysis
Postgraduate teaching
I am the course organiser and lecturer for MSc Discourse Studies in the 2019/2020 Academic year.
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
Apart from the topics directly related to my research, I am willing to consider thesis topics in the following three broad areas:
- Multimodality: I am particularly interested in projects using video-data
- Linguistic Ethnography in the context of early childhood (3-8): carer-child interaction, peer interaction, & joint-reading practices
- Text linguistics: English & Chinese
Current PhD students supervised
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 the book review editor for Discourse & Communication (Sage).
- I serve on the committee for BAAL SIG Language & New Media as the event organiser.
- I am a member of the International Collective of Research and Design in Children's Digital Books. www.childrensdigitalbooks.com
- I am a member of the FOCUS Visual & Experimental Methods Network (@FOCUSnet_work).
- I participate in the COST DigiLiTEY action (www.digilitey.eu) and acted as the Danish representative in 2017 and 2018.