Rate My Professor Monika Bednarek

Professor Monika Bednarek is Professor in Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She earned her Magister Artium in English linguistics, English literature, and Romance linguistics with a specialization in French from the University of Augsburg in 2002, followed by a PhD in English linguistics summa cum laude in 2005 and a Habilitation in English linguistics in 2008 from the same institution. She also holds a Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) from the University of Sydney in 2012. Bednarek joined the University of Sydney as a visiting scholar in 2006, advancing to Lecturer from 2009 to 2012, Senior Lecturer from 2013 to 2016, Associate Professor from 2017 to 2020, and Professor since 2021. Previously, she served as Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney from 2008 to 2009 and as Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Augsburg from 2004 to 2008. She directs the Sydney Corpus Lab and maintains extensive international visiting affiliations, including Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Birmingham in 2022, and Visiting Professor at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies from 2015 to 2016.

Bednarek's research centers on corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and media linguistics, particularly corpus-based analysis of language in news discourse and fictional television series, as well as language and emotion. Her influential publications include Language and Characterisation in Television Series: A Corpus-informed Approach to the Construction of Social Identity in the Media (2023, John Benjamins), Language and Television Series: A Linguistic Approach to TV Dialogue (2018, Cambridge University Press), The Discourse of News Values: How News Organisations Create Newsworthiness (2017, Oxford University Press, with Helen Caple), News Discourse (2012, Continuum), The Language of Fictional Television: Drama and Identity (2010, Continuum), Emotion Talk across Corpora (2008, Palgrave Macmillan), and Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus (2006, Continuum). Her scholarship has garnered over 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA, elected 2024), she has edited special issues for journals including Discourse & Communication and the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, and received University of Sydney SOAR Fellowships in 2018 and 2019.