Sumin Zhao
Reader in Discourse Analysis
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences
Contact details
- Email: sumin.zhao@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room 2.03, Dugald Stewart Building
- City
- 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AD
Availability
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, Multimodality, Social Semiotics, and Systemic Functional Grammar.
I joined LEL in November, 2018 as a Lecturer in Discourse Analysis and promoted to Reader in April, 2024. 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 (Standard & Lower Yangtze) and Wu (Shanghainese) Chinese. My name in Chinese characters are 赵苏敏(simplified) & 趙蘇敏(traditional).
Undergraduate teaching
I teach DA-related topics in the following courses in the 2024-25 academic year.
Semester 1: Introduction to Multimodality (MSc): CO
Semester 2: Discourse Analysis (Honours & MSc), CO
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 doctoral training programme Designing Responsible Natural Language Processing: https://www.responsiblenlp.org/cdt-supervisors/
Current PhD students supervised
- Tiffany Pang (Lead) 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
- Kamolwan Joncus (Lead) Thai parental groups on Facebook
- Humin Xiu (Advisory Board, National Institute of Education, Singapore) Laowai micro-influencers on Chinese social media)
- J R Wells (second)
- Natalie Lau (second, SPS)
- Narae Park (second, LLC) Discourses of Multiculturalism in Korean
- Shutong Han (second, LEL) Stylisation and Identity Construction
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 serve on the editorial board of Reading Research Quarterly.
- 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.