Dr Seth Mehl

School of English

Research Fellow

s.mehl@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 6115

Humanities Research Institute

Full contact details

Dr Seth Mehl
School of English
Humanities Research Institute
Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7QY

Profile

I am Digital Humanities Fellow in the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), where I contribute to research projects in subject areas from international development to corpus semantics. I also teach on the MA in Digital Culture and Communication, and the MA in Cultural Data Management and Communication.

I have been at the University of Sheffield since 2015, working closely with the Digital Humanities Institute throughout that time. From 2011 to 2015, I was a member of research and teaching staff at University College London’s Survey of English Usage.

I completed my PhD in English at University College London (UCL), following an MA in English Linguistics at UCL.

I am a member of The Keywords Project, the OED Advisory Forum, and the White Rose Gender Equality College. I am Digital Humanities theme lead for Sheffield in the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research. I was a council member of Britain’s oldest learned society, The Philological Society, from 2016 to 2020, and the society’s Honourary Secretary for Student Associate Members from 2012 to 2015.

Research interests

I am primarily active in two broad areas: corpus semantics and development research.

My corpus semantic research focuses on words with multiple contested meanings, which lead to cross purposes and confusion in public debate and personal conversation: for example, decolonisation, gentrification, appropriation, fundamentalism, and white. These multiple meanings often include newly emerging senses, and exhibit increasing vagueness. I also lead on the DHI’s concept modelling work, based on the Linguistic DNA project and subsequent collaborations with the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary.

My development research relies on community-led co-production with rural community researchers in South Africa. That work has supported the creation of community archives in the form of ‘live’ records of unfolding events; and records of the living memories of older adults; as a means for building capacity and exploring concepts of development and identity.

Recent and ongoing externally funded research projects include:

Many Happy Returns - Enabling Reusable Packaging Systems. Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund: Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge. (As Co-Investigator).
Land rights in rural South Africa: Creating a record of practice in an ongoing crisis. AHRC Urgency Grant. (As Principle Investigator).
Mapping community heritage with young people in rural South Africa. AHRC GCRF Network Plus Funding. (As Principle Investigator).
Youth agency, civic engagement, and sustainable development: Ideas for Southern Africa. AHRC GCRF Network Plus Funding. (As Co-Investigator).

I also support the DHI in developing research projects, programmes, and proposals, across a wide range of subjects.

Publications

Books

Project TK, MacCabe C & Yanacek H (2018) Keywords for Today A 21st Century Vocabulary. Oxford University Press.

Journal articles

Greenwood S, Walker S, Baird HM, Parsons R, Mehl S, Webb TL, Slark AT, Ryan AJ & Rothman RH (2021) Combining insights from the environmental and behavioural sciences to understand what is required to make reusable packaging mainstream. Sustainable Production and Consumption.
Mehl SW (2020) Appropriation, gentrification, colonisation: newly synonymous?. Lexis(16). View this article in WRRO
Mehl S (2020) Make us difficult: portrait of a non-standard construction. English World-Wide, 41(3), 352-367. View this article in WRRO
Mehl SW (2018) Corpus onomasiology in world Englishes and the concrete verbs make and give. World Englishes, 37(2), 185-206. View this article in WRRO
Mehl S (2018) What we talk about when we talk about corpus frequency: The example of polysemous verbs with light and concrete senses. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 0(0). View this article in WRRO
Mehl SW (2017) Light verb semantics in the International Corpus of English: Onomasiological variation, identity evidence and degrees of lightness. English Language and Linguistics. View this article in WRRO
Fitzmaurice SM, Hine IC, Robinson JA, Mehl S, Alexander M & Dallachy F (2017) Linguistic DNA: Investigating Conceptual Change in Early Modern English Discourse. Studia Neophilologica, 89(S1), 21-38. View this article in WRRO
Mehl SW & Allan K (2014) English language: Lexicography, lexicology and lexical semantics. The Year's Work in English Studies, 35-43.
Mehl S () Why Linguists Should Care about Digital Humanities (and Epidemiology). Journal of English Linguistics, 007542422110190-007542422110190.

Chapters

Mehl S (2019) Measuring lexical co-occurrence statistics against a part-of-speech baseline In Parviainen H, Kaunisto M & Pahta P (Ed.), Corpus Approaches into World Englishes and Language Contrasts Helsinki: VAIRENG E-SERIES. View this article in WRRO
Mehl SW, Aarts B & Wallis S (2016) Language Learning at Your Fingertips: Deploying Corpora in Mobile Teaching Apps In Corrigan K & Mearns A (Ed.), Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement (pp. 211-211). Springer
Fitzmaurice S, Robinson JA, Alexander M, Hine IC, Mehl S & Dallachy F () Reading into the past, Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics (pp. 53-82). John Benjamins Publishing Company

Book reviews

Mehl S (2017) Christian Kay and Kathryn Allan (eds.). 2015. English Historical Semantics. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 18(1), 152-156.
Mehl S (2016) Book Review: Corpus linguistics for grammar: A guide for research. Journal of English Linguistics, 44(2), 189-192.
Mehl S (2013) Michael Adams and Anne Curzan (eds.), Contours of English and English language studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Pp. iv + 371. ISBN 978-0-472-03466-6.. English Language and Linguistics, 17(3), 571-576.

Website content

Mehl S Investigating the linguistic DNA of life, body, and soul.

Working papers

Mehl S (2020) Discursive Quads: New kinds of lexical co-occurrence data with linguistic concept modelling. View this article in WRRO

Teaching activities

I contribute to the MA in Digital Culture and Communication, and the MA in Cultural Data Management and Communication, and convene the module Language Analysis, AI, and Culturomics.

I am an associate fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and was awarded a Learning and Teaching Fellowship (2016-2017) at the University of Sheffield to develop and convene training for postgraduates and academics in corpus linguistics and text analytics.

I have taught and convened undergraduate and postgraduate modules at the University of Sheffield, UCL, and the University of Winchester, in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, the history of English, English grammar, and research methods. I developed and convened an English grammar Continuing Professional Development course for school teachers at the UCL Institute of Education. At UCL, I was awarded funding to develop and convene annual widening participation summer schools for secondary school students from backgrounds under-represented in higher education (2012-2013). I began my teaching career teaching English as a Foreign Language in the USA, Cyprus, and the PRC.