In:Style and Reader Response: Minds, media, methods
Edited by Alice Bell, Sam Browse, Alison Gibbons and David Peplow
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 36] 2021
► pp. vii–viii
Acknowledgements
Published online: 8 February 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.36.ack
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.36.ack
In November 2016, we organised a conference titled Style and Response: Minds, Media,
Methods. Many of the chapters in this book originated as presentations at that conference. Our first thanks, therefore,
has to be to the international Poetics And Linguistics Association (PALA) and to the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at Sheffield
Hallam University for providing financial support that helped to make the event happen. Professor Chris Hopkins – as Head of the HRC –
was (and continues to be) a great source of encouragement and advice, and he kindly delivered the conference’s opening address. Thanks
also both to those presenters whose research has made its way into this book as well as to those whose thinking – as speakers and/or a
delegates – was instrumental to our discussions about empirical stylistics, including Joe Bray, Laura Coffey Glover, Ranjana Das,
Richard Finn, Melanie Green, Rachel Handforth, Chloe Harrison, Sarah Jackson, Alex Laffer, Anezka Kuzmicova, Michaela Mahlberg, Louise
Nuttall, Laura L. Paterson, Olivia Rohan, and Lizzie Stewart-Shaw, amongst others.
Our sense of the interactions between empirical research and stylistics has been informed by the scholarly associations
with which we each affiliate. Particular thanks to the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL), Critical Approaches to
Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (CADAAD), the International Association of Literary Semantics (IALS), the International Society
for the Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL), the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN), and the aforementioned
PALA, and their members.
Since the conference, the Stylistics Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University has grown and been enriched by new members of staff at our university as well as a thriving community of postgraduate researchers, all of whom have expanded
our horizons: Hugh Escott and Jessica Mason as well as Declan Bell, Katie Currie, Chantelle Devoy, Rebecca Evans, Elin Ivansson,
Eleanor Johnson, Riyukta Raghunath, and Daniel Pinder. Our thanks also to supportive colleagues, particularly our close colleagues in
English Language – Jodie Clark, Peter Jones, Karen Grainger, Sara Mills, Dave Sayers – and those more broadly in the Humanities
Department.
Lastly, thanks to the editors of the ‘Linguistic Approaches to Literature’ series, Joanna Gavins and Sonia Zyngier, for
their support and confidence in this book.
