Prof David Denison FBA
Emeritus Professor

Biography
Brief CV
After an undergraduate degree at Cambridge (Mathematics, then Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic) I did a doctorate at Oxford. For many years I was in English at Manchester (through various departmental name changes), and was HoD 1998-2001. Since 2004 I have been in Linguistics and English Language. I held a personal chair from 1995 and was Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature from 2008. In 2014 I received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. From March 2015 I am Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics, fully involved in research but no longer on the regular teaching staff at Manchester.
Visiting Positions
- 2017 Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, FRIAS (Visiting Researcher)
- 2016-17 Aichi Prefectural University (Visiting Professor)
- 2011-12 PhD Program in Linguistics in the University of Zurich (Kurzzeitdozent)
- 2006 Institut du Monde anglophone, Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle (Visiting Professor, and associate member of Groupe de Recherches en Linguistique Anglaise SESYLIA).
- 1998 Dpto. Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemana, University of Santiago de Compostela (Visiting Professor).
- 1992 Department of English, University of British Columbia (Visiting Professor).
- 1985-86 Engels Seminarium, University of Amsterdam (Gastdocent).
Editing
Linguistic editorial work
I was for many years an editor of English Language and Linguistics, which has become one of the leading journals in its field. It subsequently entered into a close relationship with the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE).
- 1995-2010 Founding editor (with Bas Aarts and †Richard Hogg) of English Language and Linguistics.
- 2012 Editor (with Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully & Emma Moore) of Analysing Older English, a collection of essays for the late Professor Richard Hogg.

- 1996-2004 General editor (with †R. H. Robins and Geoffrey Horrocks) of Longman Linguistics Library.
- 1997 Guest editor (with Nigel Vincent) of a special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society.
Miscellaneous activities
- I was one of a three-man team from the LAGB who advised the then Department for Education and Employment on materials for the literacy strategy in primary schools, notably the enhanced glossary. I retain an interest in the teaching of English language at school level, contributing to the LAGB's recommendations for grammatical terminology to be used in schools.
- Computing work has included helping with the multi-lingual Vuwriter Arts word processor in the 1980s; my own numbering program NUM in the 1990s; the acquisition of texts and corpora for the department and the use of concordance programs; building a "temporary" (1999-2005!) and increasingly versatile student record database for department and School; and constructing and processing TEI/XML files as part of an online edition.

- I chaired the organising committees of the 10th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (10ICEHL, 1998) and Directions in English Language Studies (DELS, April 2006).
- I was on the executive committee of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) 2007-14 and President 2008-11.

Many of my papers are available for download from this page, wherever possible via Pure, Manchester's institutional repository.
Related information
Publications
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review
Activities
Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk
Activity: Talk or presentation › Invited talk
Student Theses
UoM administered thesis: Phd
UoM administered thesis: Phd
UoM administered thesis: Phd