The School of Modern Languages and Cultures is seeking an exceptional individual who combines internationally leading research and innovation with an outstanding record in student education for the position of Chair in Corpus Linguistics, as part of a £23m investment in academic leadership at the University of Leeds (see www.universityofleedschairs.co.uk).

This new appointment, located in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, will lead and develop the new Faculty-based strategic Language@Leeds initiative (see below) with the aim of building on substantial existing successes and making Leeds an international leader in language-related research, scholarship and teaching. The structures of this initiative will bring together and enhance language studies in the School (the largest of its kind in the country), in the Faculty (notably English Language) and in the wider University (including Computing). Within the School, this will particularly involve staff in Translation Studies, Linguistics and Phonetics and the Language Centre. The role will require excellent leadership and
team skills and the ability to encourage and develop interdisciplinary links between the various areas represented in Language@Leeds.

The successful candidate will have an outstanding research record with a specialism within the broad of corpus linguistics, already of
significant importance within the School. This should include an excellent track record in the construction and analysis of large corpora, experience with multilingual corpora and expertise in quantitative methods, including statistics. A strong commitment to interdisciplinarity should also be demonstrated. The Chair is expected to enhance existing research in corpus linguistics in the School and to foster research collaboration within language studies at Leeds, while also making an innovative contribution to related teaching on the School’s undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

Further information and details of the application procedure are
available at http://www.universityofleedschairs.co.uk/mlc-corpus-linguistics.php Informal inquiries about the post should be directed to: Dr Claire E. Honess, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, UK, Telephone: +44(0)113 343 3631, E-mail: c.e.honess@leeds.ac.uk.

Deadline for receipt of applications: 2 March 2012

LANGUAGE@LEEDS:
Language@Leeds is a recently articulated initiative that brings together the study of language, both in terms of teaching and research. Within this, the Language@Leeds Research Hub aims to  link up existing research groups from the Faculties of Arts, Engineering, Medicine and Health, and Education and provide them with (i) a coherent outward-facing identity with the potential to make Leeds an internationally recognised centre of excellence for the study of language, (ii) centralised research support (within the Faculty of Arts) to better enable the incremental growth of expertise, (iii) the infrastructure necessary to enable more and better inter-disciplinary research.

The Chair will be expected to develop further the Language@Leeds Research Hub within the proposed framework and in conjunction with the team that defined it (comprising the research directors from Linguistics & Phonetics, the Centre for Translation Studies, the language group of the School of English, and the director of the Language, Linguistics & Translation research group within the School of Modern Languages and Cultures).