Ursula Kania

I am a corpus linguist, currently focusing on the areas of language and gender, language and sexuality (e.g., analysis of marriage-equality debates, gendered/LGBTQI+ discourses in culinary texts, using corpus-assisted (critical) discourse analysis), as well as culinary linguistics, especially issues of food and identity and representations of particular food(ways) in the media (e.g., representations of Chinese food(ways) in the UK press in the context of COVID-19). As of current, I am part of an interdisciplinary project in collaboration with Lucienne Loh (University of Liverpool), Victorina Gonzalez-Diaz (University of Liverpool) and Ross Forman (University of Warwick) to explore representations of Chinese food culture in the context of the recent rise in COVID-19-related Sinophobia. The project aims to, through a language perspective, expose the stigmatisation of the Chinese and their food culture in current press coverage of COVID-19 as a perpetuation of 20th and 21st-century misrepresentations of the Chinese and their foodways. It also aims to, through a literary and cultural studies perspective, explore creative responses to Sinophobia and misrepresentations of Chinese food culture in order to foreground expressive forms of resistance to the denigrating effects of Sinophobia in the pandemic age.