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Experienced Leader in Higher Ed

  • Professor, Department of English and Communication, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (65th in QS World Rankings)

  • Multi-cultural leadership experience at 4 universities in Taiwan & Hong Kong

  • Dept Head at HKBU for 7 years: Created new college writing programs, responsible for hiring, tenure, promotion, course programs and development, financials

  • Director of HKBU's Int'l Writers' Workshop for 5 years: Invited writers from around the world to engage with students 

  • Chair, Department Research Committee, PolyU - 6 years - Doubled research funding to department, 100% graduate rate for PhD students

  • Panel Member, Hong Kong Research Grants Council Psychology and Linguistics: World-leading scholars chosen to review competitive research funding

  • Dedicated mentor: Supervised/co-supervised 12 Ph.D. students and 4 post-doctoral fellows, ten of whom now hold full-time faculty positions

  • Fluent in Mandarin Chinese

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Image by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič

ACADEMIC LEADERSHIP

  • Experienced administrator - directs end-to-end program development, course development, assessment development, degree requirements, stakeholder relations, committee leadership, and quality audit compliance

  • Prolific researcher with proven track record gaining competitive research grants and project management, including personnel & financial management, project reporting and dissemination; over 80 journal articles and book chapters, including in Journal of Pragmatics, Metaphor & Symbol, Applied Linguistics, and Humanities & Social Sciences (Nature)

  • Effective manager for teams of 3 to 60+ employees, both academic and administrative; responsible for budgeting, hiring, duty/teaching assignments, performance evaluations, contract renewals, tenure applications & professional development

  • International leader for regional and global non-profit/academic organizations, including International Regional Advisor Chair for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrations, ExCom Chair for the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (registered UK non-profit), and President for the Hong Kong Academy of Humanities

  • Sought after public speaker with 25+ years of tertiary teaching experience; presented at 250+ invited talks, keynotes, and conference papers in 12+ countries across Asia & Europe, US, UK & Australia

  • Certified Gallup Strengths Coach, and Graduate of Harvard's Management Development Program (Deans and Heads)

RESEARCH PROFILE

My recent research has focused on corpora-based analyses, with a particular emphasis on examining the lexical choices made and the conceptual metaphors used by speakers from different groups. This area of research contributes to understanding how these linguistic choices reflect a speaker’s worldview and their associated strategies to influence others to their points of view.


In addition to these corpora-based analyses, I also run experiments using web-based systems to ascertain participants’ judgments about carefully constructed texts in order to better model how the conceptual metaphors used in those texts may influence reasoning. 

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Distinguished researchers from around the world examine the interplay between gender and metaphor in political language in Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, and Singapore. They draw on a wide variety of corpus data to determine to what extent metaphors used by women in political power differ with, or remain the same as that of men. They also examine what effect metaphor use has on women's power in the political arena. This wide-ranging collection of language-based studies will interest students and researchers in discourse analysis, political communication, gender studies, journalism, and media studies.

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"The importance of this book can be seen in the way that it brings together a focus on language (and conceptual metaphors in particular) and politics and applies feminist research questions and methodologies in thinking through this relationship. Language is a tool involved in knowledge production and thus political action, thus it should be analyzed cautiously which is precisely what the contributors of this book manage to do." - International Feminist Journal of Politics 

Between Walls

FAQ

WHERE CAN I FIND YOUR ARTICLES?

You can go to my webpage on ResearchGate or my PolyU Scholars page. Additional information about recent publications can be found on my SCOPUS page as well as on my ORCID page. You can also reach me at Kathleen.ahrensATpolyu.edu.hk.

ARE YOU TAKING ON PHD STUDENTS?

No, my lab is full! But check out other great researchers at our department website and be sure to look into the fellowship opportunities at HK PolyU!

WHO ARE YOUR FAVORITE ACADEMIC SUBSTACK WRITERS?

I am so glad you asked! I have two: Heather Cox Anderson, who brings a historical perspective to current US political news, and Mirya Holman, who writes humorous posts about succeeding in academia. Both are free!

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