Professor Gabriella Rundblad

Professor Gabriella Rundblad is a Cognitive Linguist who specialises in semantics and pragmatics, especially figurative language. Her two main areas of research are:

• development of language and cognition in mono-/bilingual neurotypical and neurodiverse populations, and
• language and cognition in health, risk and disaster communication, including vulnerable populations such as ethnic minorities and neurodiverse individuals.

The impact of Gabriella’s research was documented as one of King’s Impact Case Studies for REF2021, and during the COVID pandemic, she worked closely with ECS colleagues, health professionals and the Sylheti, Pahari and Pashto communities to spread key health messages and raise awareness in these predominantly oral ethnic minority communities.

The first in her family to achieve A-levels, Gabriella decided to study English, German and Linguistics at Stockholm University. While working as an upper-secondary school teacher, she completed her PGCE (1996) and PhD (1997), for which she was awarded a Young Researcher award from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (1998). Gabriella worked as a Lecturer at Umeå University (1998) before moving to Sheffield to pursue a Post-Doc funded by the Swedish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences (1998-99). She next worked as a Lecturer at the University of East Anglia for five years, before joining King’s in 2004. Gabriella was promoted to Reader in 2016 and Professor in 2020. Living with multiple complex disabilities, she is very passionate about EDI issues and how to achieve well in higher education while looking after one’s wellbeing.

In ECS, she has served in several administrative roles, such as Deputy Education Lead (2010-2016), Member of School Executive Committee (2016-2021), School Education Lead (2016-2017) and School Research Lead (2018-2021). As REF UoA Lead (2018-), Gabriella also oversaw King’s Education submission to REF 2021.

Gabriella is a founding member of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association and has served on its Board since 2005, currently as President. Since 2009, she is also a member of the Executive Committee of the University Council of General and Applied Linguistics (UCGAL). UCGAL works to strengthen Linguistics in UK higher education and improve the number of students doing English Language A-Levels. In this capacity, Gabriella has participated in consultations for REF2014 and REF2021 in relation to all panels that assess Linguistics and in consultations on Open Access.

Teaching

Gabriella teaches and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate students in cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive approaches in discourse analysis, language change and historical linguistics, and research methods.

She has worked closely with undergraduate students attached to her research projects through King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (KURF): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdaJge5NpHA

PhD supervision

Gabriella welcomes applications in the areas of:

• Language, cognition and discourse;
• Development of language and cognition in mono-/bilinguals;
• Development of language and cognition in neurodiverse populations;
• Language and cognition in health, risk and disaster communication;
• Health, risk and disaster communication with vulnerable populations, ethnic minorities and neurodiverse individuals.

Further information

For further details, please see Gabriella's Research Staff Profile.