Role
Dr Coffey-Glover teaches in the School of Social Sciences within the subject area of Linguistics. She mainly teaches in the areas of discourse analysis, language, gender and sexuality and health communication.
Career overview
Laura started at NTU in September 2016, having previously taught English Language and Linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University, as well as the Universities of Manchester, Edge Hill, Liverpool Hope and Huddersfield, where she gained her PhD on constructions of masculinity in women’s magazines.
Research areas
Dr Coffey-Glover is a feminist discourse studies scholar interested in how gendered stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination are manifest in language choices, particularly in the broad institution of parenthood. She is currently writing a book on Language and Infant Feeding in the UK (Bloomsbury), which analyses public health, media and commercial influences on parents’ infant feeding decision-making and experiences of infant feeding support. The book utilises tools and methods in Feminist Critical Discourse Studies, including corpus-assisted discourse analysis, multimodality and reflexive thematic analysis, to examine the potentially harmful impacts of dominant messaging on parents’ experiences of infant feeding and mental wellbeing.
She has previously published papers on related topics including discourses of masculinity in representations of non-birthing partners in infant feeding advice, the marginalisation of the exclusive expression of milk in public health advice on infant feeding and intensive motherhood in personal online accounts of ‘exclusive pumping’. Previous collaborative projects also include publications on the gendering of children’s toys, discourses of marriage in the UK, sexism in popular music and discourses of masculinity in women’s lifestyle magazines. Her first book, Men in Women’s Worlds (Palgrave, 2019) presented a feminist stylistic analysis of masculinities in a corpus of UK women’s lifestyle magazines.
Dr Coffey-Glover welcomes applications to supervise postgraduate research in any area of feminist discourse studies, but particularly welcomes projects that combine corpus linguistic and critical discourse approaches to topics in parenthood, women’s health, or linguistic sexism.
External activity
Dr Coffey-Glover is on the editorial board for the Journal of Language and Discrimination, and regularly reviews for international journals in the field. She is an active member of the British Association for Applied Linguistics Language, Gender and Sexuality Special Interest Group, and regularly presents her work at national and international conferences.