Before coming to Finland, I obtained my PhD at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and “second PhD” (habilitation) from the University of Basel, Switzerland. Originally, I hail from the Far North of Russia.

My past projects include “Discursive identity in microblogging”, a pragmatic investigation of a Twitter community using qualitative and corpus-assisted methods, and “Language of seduction”, a study of how a gendered community of ‘pick-up artists’ uses language for manipulative purposes. I am a founding member of the research groups ‘Online Selves - Self Online’ (OSSO) and ‘Communicative Practices on Reddit’ (copRE).

I have created and explored a large corpus of spoken language for a study of Russian-English conference interpreting. My current project uses large corpora of reddit and twitter data to pose linguistic questions about pragmatic variation online, especially about positive communication on social media (compliments, self-praise). I am also interested in power and persuasion in forensic linguistic contexts, for example, in police interviews or online grooming situation.

Participating in academic life

I am the Editor-in-Chief for Pragmatics & Society. Previously I served as the Multilingual Website Editor for Target. International Journal for Translation Studies, and the book review editor for Discourse Studies. As a member of the advisory board for Internet Pragmatics, I regularly review for this journal, as well as for Discourse, Context & Media; Journal of Pragmatics; Journal of Politeness Research; Text & Talk; language@internet, Sexuality & Culture, and monographs for John Benjamins, Peter Lang, and Routledge.

I am the vice president of the steering board for the PLURAL research centre at Tampere University. I took part in the university self-government by taking on elected positions in the PhD Senate Committee and the Faculty Committee of the Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Basel.

I am a member of Association of Internet Researchers, European Society for Translation Studies, International Pragmatics Association, International Society for the Linguistics of English, The Finnish Association for Applied Linguistics and The Finnish Society for the Study of English.