About

Dr David Wright is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University. He is a corpus-based forensic linguist, and has research interests in all areas of language and law, evidence, crime and justice.He is co-author of An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence (2nd edn) with Professor Malcolm Coulthard and Dr Alison May (was Johnson).

In 2015 David was awarded hisPhD from the University of Leeds, which focused on developing corpus linguistic methods in forensic authorship analysis. He has been a lecturer at NTU since September 2014 and teaches across a broad range of research-led modules. He regularly attends and present papers at conferences and have published work in international journals. In addition, he holds the following academic roles:

​Editorial/advisory board positions

  • Advisory board member for Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (CADAAD journal)
  • Editorial board member Journal of Indonesian Community for Forensic Linguistics
  • Associate Editor for Frontiers in Communication – Language Sciences
  • Section Editor for Corpus Linguistics in The Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (3rd edn) (with Gavin Brookes).
  • ​Reviews Editor for the journal Language and Law (Linguagem e Direito)
  •  Section Editor for Corpus Linguistics for Open Linguistics (De Gruyter) (between 2014-16)
  • Co-editor of Volume 30 of the Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics.​

Peer-Reviewing

  • ​Reviewed articles for Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, Corpora, Critical Discourse Studies, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, English Today, Frontiers in Communication, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, International Journal of Evidence and Proof, International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Law (Linguagem e Direito), Language and Literature.
  • Reviewed book/series proposals or manuscripts for Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Bloomsbury, Palgrave, and Polity Press.
  • Reviewed grant applications for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), The Nuffield Foundation, The British Academy and The Austrian Science Fund.

He regularly reviews conference abstracts for national and international conferences.

​External Examining ​

  • ​Between 2016 – 2020 he was external examiner for the BA English Language and Linguistics programme at Oxford Brookes University.
  • He has acted as External Examiner for PhD theses in forensic linguistics, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.

​Memberships​ and roles

  • UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Early Career Researcher Forum
  • International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL) – Executive Committee Member
  • International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA)
  • British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL)
  • Germanic Society for Forensic Linguistics (GSFL)
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA)
  • Committe Member of BAAL Corpus Linguistics Special Interest Group, Meetings Secretary (2019-2022)