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Alon Lischinsky's personal website

A black-and-white portrait showing head and shoulders of Alon, a middle-aged white person. Alon has long, curly hair slicked in a side parting, a handlebar moustache and a goatee, and is gazing down with eyes half-closed; they are wearing a black top with a skulls print.

Hi! I'm Alon, and my pronouns are they/them.

About me

I'm a corpus linguist (meaning I research how people use language using computer-aided methods that make it possible to analyse more data than would be possible by hand) and a discourse analyst (meaning I look at how people use language to do things, like promoting themselves as experts or convincing people to see things in a certain way).

My main research interest is in the role of language in gender and sexuality: how we tell each other stories about what is sexual and what isn't, what is normal and desirable in sexual behaviour, and about the identity and sexuality of trans, non-binary and gender-nonconforming people. I also work on the use of language in branding, marketing and public relations; the discourse of management, especially popular management books; the communication of environmental issues and sustainability; and more generally the role of language in professional, public and cultural life.

I work as a Senior Lecturer in Discourse and Communication at Oxford Brookes University, where I teach in the School of History, Philosophy and Culture, but I'm an academic wanderer and don't take much stock in disciplinary boundaries. I completed an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and a master's degree in Sociology before doing doctoral work in Linguistics, which I carried out under the supervision of Teun A. van Dijk at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Umeå University, this time in Media and Culture Studies, before joining Brookes.

I'm one of the editors of the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, which we launched in 2018 to promote openness and replicability in linguistics. (If that's something that interests you, join us at the Linguistics Data Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance.) I'm also book review editor for Discourse & Society, and sit in the editorial board of Critical Discourse Studies, the International Journal of Marketing Semiotics and Asparkia.

I'm also a trade union rep for our branch of the Universities and Colleges Union, an LGBTQ+ rights activist and an occasional performer.