The research conducted in the Department of English at AUS is of value to a wide language community and makes difference in society, economy and people skills. A list of high-impact research projects carried out by faculty members is provided below.
Ahmed, Khawlah. The Linguistic and Semiotic Landscapes of Dubai
This research project investigates the linguistic landscapes in the contemporary mega-city of Dubai. It examines Dubai’s unique trajectory in relation to other mega cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong. As a multilingual and multicultural city there is abundant linguistic and semiotic matter that is of interest to linguists and the description of the construction of space.
Ajšić, Adnan. Sharjah Language Ideology Corpus (SLIC).
This research project aims to compile a large (ca. 400-500 million words) corpus of public language-related discourse in the United States in the period between 1987 and 2017 from hundreds of thousands of relevant newspaper articles published in the five major US dailies (The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, plus The Wall Street Journal) to enable a study of language ideologies in circulation in contemporary US society.
Al-Issa, Ahmad. Englishization of Higher Education in the UAE: Impact and Future Directions.
The project investigates the status of English in the UAE and provides an in-depth analysis of both the positive and negative impacts of the implementation of English as a medium of instruction in institutions of higher education in the UAE. It further makes suggestions for language policy and planning.
Al-Jubouri, Firas A.J. De-centering, Re-centering: Teaching English through Canonical English Literature.
This project focuses on the teaching of canonical English Literary texts for mostly non-native English speakers and assesses the nature of the “local” concerns.
Bae, Sun-Hee. Plaster, Keith. Polinsky, Maria. (2012). Heritage Korean. Harvard Dataverse, hdl:1902.1/18833.
This project recorded and transcribed narratives of heritage Koreans living in the US. This research was supported by the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, the Faculty of Arts & Sciences at Harvard University, and the National Heritage Language Resource Center.
Bahloul, Maher. Investigating Emirati Pidgin Arabic (2019-2021).
This project is an investigation of an emerging language in the UAE. According to Smart (1990), this new language meets the requirement of a pidginized variety as described in the pidgin and creole literature. Within the UAE, the Gulf and Middle Eastern Regions in general, a new pidgin has been developing, which has attracted a number of well-established and young researchers such as Bizri (2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2018) and Almoaily (2013). Although a few studies exist, Emirati Pidgin Arabic remains much less studied, making one of the main aims of our investigation to provide a thorough analysis of this variety from linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives.
Benati, Alessandro. Language Learning and Teaching in Macedonia: Policy and Delivery.
This EU-funded project provided the basis for (a) a fundamental change in the country’s language education policy and (b) a significant improvement in grammar teaching methodology throughout Macedonia. This project played a crucial role in enhancing the possibility for co-existence and security of the three communities (Serbian, Macedonian and Albanian) through better communication and cultural awareness.
El-Sakran, Tharwat M. An Exploratory Investigation of Textual Differences Between Two Academic Genres: The Research Article and Its Subsequent Poster (2018-2019).
This study utilizes a comparative discourse analysis approach on the engineering research article (RA) and its subsequent poster. Specifically, it examines the two genres to find out what textual items are being sacrificed when a RA is transformed into a poster. Results should benefit poster presenters from all academic fields.
Golley, Nawar Al-Hassan. The Power of Discourse: Uncovering the Ideology of Gender Representations in Saudi Media.
Employing feminist critical discourse analysis, and transitivity analysis, the project analyzes the representation of women in official newspapers in Saudi Arabia in order to examine the possible relationship with the current political processes towards gender equity in the country. The project is interdisciplinary as it combines linguistic, media and gender studies.
Gregersen, Tammy. Personality and Wellbeing among Language Teachers.
Teaching foreign/second languages is an inherently stressful occupation, with levels of stress increasing for educators across the globe. Given that language teachers’ perceptions of stress and sense of wellbeing are central to their ability to teach well, it is surprising that this topic has received so little research attention to date. This study examines correlations among personality, wellbeing and stress among an international sample of language teachers. As the first part of a larger study, measures of the big five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness), the PERMA wellbeing framework (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishments), and two types of stressors (chronic stressors and life events/daily hassles) were gathered via eMoodie, a specially designed smartphone app. Results show that both personality and stress are consistently correlated with teacher wellbeing. However, personality and stress were not found to correlate with each other. Results point to the need to better understand both the sources of stress and the positive uplifts experienced by teachers as they contribute to wellbeing. Given the important role(s) played by teachers, it is imperative that research contributes to a better understanding of how language teachers can flourish in their profession.
Highland, Kristen Doyle. In the Bookstore: Local Literary Spaces in Antebellum New York City.
This book project, which is still in progress, offers the first extended study of the history and social life of the bookstore in nineteenth-century America. The bookstore—as building, business and social space—negotiated questions of access, textual and generic value, as well as promoted models of literary and market engagement. Whereas much scholarship in literary studies and book history frames literary history as the study of texts, authors and readers, I argue that literary history must also engage the spaces and places in which Americans encountered books. Developing original methods for analyzing print and literary culture, this book focuses on the forms of a specific institution in one specific location, re-envisioning literary culture as a localized material experience shaped by the bookstore’s physical layout, social space, and marketing materials. This conceptualization of literary culture as a material experience remains relevant to current transformations in the retail book landscape wrought by digital technologies.
Kassam, Hamada. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Vernacular (White) Arabic (2016–present).
This independent translation project pays homage to Twain’s eventual decision of abandoning formal English and using vernacular dialects in his seven-year composition of his 1884 masterpiece. There have been many Arabic translations of Twain’s book but all of them have adopted formal Arabic, consequently failing to capture and reflect Twain’s book design and the beauty and freshness of its narration style, character types, and cultural motifs. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Vernacular (White) Arabic employs the element of domestication in translation in order to enable Arab readers to understand and enjoy Twain’s subtle social, historical and political messages and nuances of meanings.
Keegan, Daniel. Shakespearean Theatre? Literature, Love, Action.
In this book project, I will investigate the figures through which Shakespeare imagined the interaction of literature and performance: these figures include digestion, prophecy, debt and love. I argue that the figure of "love," in particular, revises the ideologies of scripted performance that we, and our academic disciplines, have inherited from the nineteenth century. A more loving (Shakespearean) theatre might liberate our performances and our politics.
McAllister, Brian J. Lithic Time, Lyric Space: Narrating the Anthropocene.
This project explores transmedial strategies for understanding and reconciling the disorienting conditions of the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch in which humans have become a geological force and human spatiotemporality engages with the far more expansive scope of the lithic. I argue that we can turn to the nonnarrative mode of lyric for strategies to reposition these disjunctive temporalities. By considering lyric as a transmedial rhetorical mode—most famous for its poetic examples but equally present in other forms—I argue that lyric works (in music, visual art, film, monuments, and literature) complicate ontological boundaries between seemingly irreconcilable spaces and times. While nonnarrative, these lyrical engagements with human and lithic space-time establish ontological frames in which narratives of climate change become more seeable and sayable.
McCarthy, Philip M. Auto-Peer: An Automated Student-Writing Peer (2018–2020).
Auto-Peer is an intelligent tutoring system and student-writer automated peer. Together with a field of leading international researchers, the project seeks to develop a tool that operates as an automated pair of scholarly eyes and scholarly feedback. The tool helps to develop student-writer critical thinking skills by examining student text prior to grading submission. The tool does not grade the writing; instead, Auto-Peer searches and highlights the student’s writing, looking for critical errors found in novice writing. Once found, suspect areas of text are highlighted and automated feedback is provided. Through critical thinking questioning, students are guided to either correct or justify their writing choices.
Parra-Guinaldo, Víctor. The Relexification of Diminutives.
The relexification of diminutives has proven to be one of the most productive ways for the creation of new words. This phenomenon consists of the reanalysis of a lexical item composed of root + diminutive suffix, whereby the original semantic value of the suffix is bleached over time and its form is subsequently reanalyzed as part of the new root carrying new meaning. A classic example of this semantic shift in Latin is AURIS + -CULA = oreja “ear.” The project has resulted so far in a typology of diminutives in the Spanish language across time, but it will eventually include other Romance languages.
Reiff, Marija. The Syncretic Stage: Religion and Popular Drama During the Fin de Siècle.
This project traces the reappearance of religion on the fin de siècle stage after decades of its practical absence (while portrayals of religion did exist prior to the end of the century, they were relatively minor and almost uniformly orthodox). By looking at the works of Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero and Oscar Wilde—the most popular and commercially successful playwrights of the era—it is revealed that a new type of theatre, one that was willing to probe different faith traditions and to explore them deeply, genuinely and, sometimes even critically, arose. This is what I call the “syncretic stage,” and it exposes how the modern theatre was surprisingly more religious, not less, than its predecessors.
Shim, Ji Young. Word Order Variation in Arabic-English Code-Switching (in progress).
Together with Philip McCarthy, we are build a bilingual corpus of Arabic and English spoken in the UAE and further provide a linguistic account of various word order patterns found in Arabic-English code-switching in nominal and clausal domains.
