I am the Director of Media Programmes and Senior Lecturer in English Language, at the School of Design of Middlesex University. Before moving to Middlesex in 2015, I worked at the European University of Cyprus, University of Surrey, Swansea University and King's College London.
My research interests are in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. I have mainly worked with Greek Cypriot data, yet my work and publications are not positioned solely within Cypriot and Greek Studies but also in the broader fields of interactional approaches to language and identities research, and especially language and ageing.
I currently work on the Grenglish project, documenting the unique variety of mainly first-generation London’s Cypriot Greek speakers, which includes borrowing English words and incorporating them into the Cypriot Greek grammatical system. I am also the co-investigator in the Migrant food, languages, and identities in the dawn of the post-Brexit and COVID-19 era project with collaborators from Universities of Westminster, Salerno (Italy), Goldsmiths and Ohio State.
I am a founding member of the Language and Communication research cluster and the Ageing research and practice group.
Qualifications:
Cypriot Greek, Standard Modern Greek, English, Spanish
I enjoy teaching undergraduate and postgraduate modules in language and communication, research methods and entrepreneurship.
I currently co-supervise postgraduate researchers, who work on the following topics:
Producing and perceiving students’ requests in social media messaging: A case study of institutional contexts in Thailand;
Effects of metacognitive reading strategy instruction on L2 reading comprehension and motivation: A meta-analysis and a teaching intervention;
I welcome enquires from prospective PhD students on ageing, discourse and identities, and talk-in-interaction.
My research interests include:
Check my research outputs here: https://repository.mdx.ac.uk/researcher/80903/dr-anna-charalambidou
View more publicationsTo date, I have been awarded a total of £109.245 research and knowledge transfer awards for individual and mainly collaborative projects including:
Migrant food, languages, and identities in the dawn of the post-Brexit and COVID-19 era
This project, funded by Research England, investigates how post-2008 migrants use language over, about, and around Greek and Italian food to construct their identities and position themselves in London’s diverse food scene. Attending particularly to the embodied and sensory nature of food and language, we explore how the foodways – the material and symbolic practices for producing and consuming food – of post-2008 migrants are linked to notions of individual and community belonging against the backdrop of Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic and post-Covid recession. This is a collaboration with colleagues from Westminster, Goldsmiths, Salerno and Ohio State Universities, and industry professionals.
The Grenglish Project
I am working on a community engagement project: The Grenglish Project, with Dr Petros Karatsareas (Westminster). Like many other community languages that were transplanted from their places of origin to London as a result of migration, Cypriot Greek developed in a unique way in the British capital including through the borrowing of a host of English words and their incorporation into the Cypriot Greek grammatical system. These words came to be collectively recognised as a new linguistic variety labelled Grenglish, unique to London’s Cypriot Greek speakers. We want aim to capture the Grenglish lexical stock in a way that involves the community and creates impact through a permanent record of its linguistic history. Our website offers the opportunity to British Cypriots to upload Grenglish material: words; their form; their meaning; visual material; stories that involve the use of Grenglish; thoughts about their origin.
Diversity that we can hear
I was the Principal Investigator working with colleagues from Middlesex, Northumbria and York on a project entitled 'Diversity that we can hear'. This research aims to analyse tutors’ awareness and perceptions of issues around accent diversity (whether regional, global or second language) in the secondary and university classroom in the UK and whether and how accent diversity affects their teaching practices and curriculum design.
Consuming Authenticities: Time, Place and the Past in the Construction of "Authentic" Foods and Drinks
I was a co-investigator at the 'Consuming Authenticities: Time, Place and the Past in the Construction of "Authentic" Foods and Drinks' project, sponsored by the AHRC - Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past (£54,753). It addressed the temporal relationships and ideas that contribute to the construction of narratives of authenticity in relation to four foods and drinks: pulque (an alcoholic drink from Central Mexico), flaounes (celebration Easter pies from Cyprus), Welsh craft cider and acarajé (a street snack from Brazil).For more information, please check the project's blog. An outcome of this project is the general audience book (email me for a complimentary copy): Abbots, E. J., Charalambidou, A. Martins A. and Toner, D. (2015) Authentic Recipes from Around the World. Ceredigion, Wales: HAT Events. ISBN 978 0956255396
School Partnerships
I am keen to forge partnerships and community engagement programmes between Middelsex and schools and colleges. I coordinated a partnership between Middlesex and Haringey Sixth Form College. Middlesex English students mentored students from Haringey College and together they coproduced the 2018 volume of the magazine and blog 'Haringey Unchained', which bring out the critical and creative consciousness of a vibrant college and diverse university. Email me for a copy of the magazine.
Membership of learned societies:
Public talks and refereed conference presentations (since 2013):
April 2023. 'Selling Greek food in London: constructions of authenticity' with P. Karatsareas, C. Flora, V. Lytra. Presentation at the 9th Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Culture conference (EELC9), University College London.
Jun 2021, ‘Grenglish: New understandings of the linguistic varieties of the British Greek Cypriot diaspora’ with Petros Karatsareas. Presentation at Approaches to Migration, Language & Identity (AMLI) 2021, University of Sussex.
Jul 2021,‘Exploring linguistic hybridity and lexical creativity in the UK’s Greek Cypriot diaspora: the Grenglish Project’ with Petros Karatsareas. Presentation at the 17th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA), Winterthur, Switzerland.
I tweet @DrAnnaMDX
