A native of the polyglot city of Bradford, I have taught at Edge Hill since 2003, having previously studied at the Universities of York and Bradford, and having worked at the Universities of Bradford, St Andrews, Manchester, Southampton and Sheffield.   In autumn 2006 I was also a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. 

I have taught across the linguistics curriculum, including Level 4 modules on sociolinguistics and phonetics/phonology, Level 5 modules on grammar, history and development of English, discourse ana;lysis, the language of Shakespeare and his time, and phonetics/phonology, and Levelk 6 modules on typology (Beyond English) and English in Contact, and have taught MA topics in language and imperialism.  I have been coordinator for Level 6 Language dissertations since 2005.  I have run the Linguistics Research Seminar since 2014 and ran the Departmental Research Seminar from 2004-2023. 

Research interests include the history of English and other languages, pidgins, creoles and mixed languages, Germanic and Romance linguistics, Romani, Austronesian and Native American languages, and issues in language contact and typology. I have also worked on a description of Pearl Lagoon Basin Miskitu of Nicaragua.

I have been on the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages since 2002, and have been co-editor since 2020. 

In addition to the 2 PhD theses listed under my name, I have co-supervised one MRes dissertation (Georgia Emmett, "Complex onset acquisition by autistic-spectrum and non-autistic children", 2023) and was director of studies for another three (Gemma Simpkin, "Loanwords in Georgian". August 2015, Robert Jones "Developments in English in the early 19th century", 2018 and Rebecca Grocott "Issues in Cornish linguistic revival", also 2016) and an MA thesis (Elizabeth Carr, "Contrastive analysis of he impact of French and Norse on English", 2014).