Professor Susan M. Fitzmaurice

School of English

Vice President and Head of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Professor and Chair of English Language

English Susan Fitzmaurice
Profile picture of English Susan Fitzmaurice
s.fitzmaurice@sheffield.ac.uk
+44 114 222 0213

Full contact details

Professor Susan M. Fitzmaurice
School of English
Humanities Research Institute
Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7QY
Profile

Susan Fitzmaurice is currently Vice President and Head of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Her home academic department is the School of English where she is Professor and Chair of English Language

Fitzmaurice has been at the University of Sheffield since 2006; she served as Head of the School of English from 2011 till 2015. She was previously Professor of English and Head of Department, and then Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at Northern Arizona University until December 2005. From 1987 to 1995, she was University Lecturer in English and Fellow of St. Catharine´s College, Cambridge, and from 1984 to 1986, she was Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Cape Town.

Fitzmaurice is co-editor with Bernd Kortmann of the Topics in English Linguistics (TiEL) series for Mouton de Gruyter and she serves on the Council of the  Philological Society.

Research interests

Fitzmaurice's research centres on the history of the English language, using methodological perspectives provided by historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics and computational linguistics. She is particularly interested in the methods and kinds of evidence employed in historical approaches to language study. She  focusses on semantic-pragmatic change and the utility of different frameworks for explaining such changes in time and space.

Fitzmaurice leads a digital humanities research group which uses concept modelling to explore meaning by identifying lexical and semantic patterns in very large text corpora. This work emerged from the AHRC-funded project: Linguistic DNA: Modelling concepts and semantic change in English 1500-1800 (AH/M00614X/1), which used high-performance computing and data visualisation to identify lexical and semantic patterns in early modern English texts. Linguistic DNA was a collaboration between colleagues at the Universities of Glasgow and Sussex and data specialists in the Humanities Research Institute (HRI).

For more information about the team and to follow the project’s progress, see the website and blog posts.

Fitzmaurice is also interested in using humanities approaches and methods in development research. With Patricia Cowell, Seth Mehl, Meesha Warmington and Sharron Hinchliffe, she collaborates with local South African NGO, Pala Forerunners, and colleagues at the University of Pretoria on GCRF-funded projects to train researchers and build research capacity in rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa.  For more information on this work, see the UK-ZA Community Research website

Publications

Books

Journal articles

Chapters

  • Fitzmaurice S (2020) 4 Reflections on historicity, technology and the implications for method in (historical) pragmatics, Message and Medium (pp. 80-84). De Gruyter RIS download Bibtex download
  • Paternoster A & Fitzmaurice S (2019) Politeness in nineteenth-century Europe, a research agenda In Paternoster A & Fitzmaurice S (Ed.), Politeness in Nineteenth-Century Europe (pp. 1-35). John Benjamins Publishing Company RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S (2019) Transnational Languages, Multilinguals and the Challenges for LADO, Language Policy(Netherlands) (pp. 193-209). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S (2018) Margaret Cavendish, the doctors of physick and advice to the sick, A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (pp. 210-241). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2018) Transnational languages, multilinguals and the challenges for LADO In Patrick PL, Schmid MS & Zwaan K (Ed.), Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin: Current Perspectives and New Directions (pp. 193-209). Springer International Publishing View this article in WRRO RIS download Bibtex download
  • Starner JW & Fitzmaurice SM (2017) Shaping a drama out of a history: Elizabeth Cary and the story of edward ii, Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700: Elizabeth Cary (pp. 445-458). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2016) Sincerity and the moral reanalysis of politeness in late modern English: Semantic change and contingent polysemy In Chapman D, Moore C & Wilcox M (Ed.), Studies in the History of the English Language VII: Generalizing vs. Particularizing Methodologies in Historical Linguistic Analysis (pp. 173-202). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. View this article in WRRO RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S (2015) English aristocratic letters In Auer A, Schreier D & Watts RJ (Ed.), Letter Writing and Language Change (pp. 156-184). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S (2014) History, social meaning, and identity in the spoken English of postcolonial white Zimbabweans In Taavitsainen I, Kyto M, Claridge C & Smith J (Ed.), Developments in English (pp. 200-223). Cambridge University Press RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2012) Sociability: Conversation and the Performance of Friendship in early eighteenth century letters In Busse U (Ed.), The Meta-communicative Lexicon of English Now and Then: A Historical Pragmatics Approach (pp. 21-43). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2011) The sociopragmatics of a lovers' spat: The case of the eighteenth-century courtship letters of Mary Pierrepont and Edward Wortley In Culpeper J (Ed.), Historical Sociopragmatics (pp. 37-59). John Benjamins Publishing RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2011) Poetic collaboration and competition in the late seventeenth century: George Stepney’s letters to Jacob Tonson and Matthew Prior In Pahta P (Ed.), Communicating Early English Manuscripts (pp. 118-132). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S (2010) Literary discourse, Historical Pragmatics (pp. 679-704). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2010) Coalitions, networks, and discourse communities in Augustan England: The Spectator and the early eighteenth-century essay In Hickey R (Ed.), Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change (pp. 106-132). Cambridge University Press RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2010) Changes in the meaning of politeness in eighteenth-century England: Discourse analysis and historical evidence In Culpeper J, Kádár DZ & Culpeper J (Ed.), Historical Impoliteness (pp. 87-115). Peter Lang Pub Incorporated RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2010) Mr Spectator, identity and social roles in an early eighteenth-century community of practice and the periodical discourse community (pp. 29-53). RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM (2010) Literary Discourse In Jucker AH (Ed.), Handbook of Historical Pragmatics (pp. 651-676). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S (2007) Questions of standardization and representativeness in the development of social networks- based corpora: The story of the network of eighteenth-century english texts, Creating and digitizing language corpora (pp. 49-81). Palgrave Macmillan UK RIS download Bibtex download
  • 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 RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice SM () Semantic and pragmatic change, The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics (pp. 256-270). Cambridge University Press RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S & Smith J () Evidence for the history of English: Introduction, The Oxford Handbook of the History of English (pp. 19-36). Oxford University Press RIS download Bibtex download
  • Fitzmaurice S () L1 Rhodesian English, The Lesser-Known Varieties of English (pp. 263-285). Cambridge University Press RIS download Bibtex download

Conference proceedings papers

Research group

Fitzmaurice supervises doctoral projects on topics including semantic change and marginal vocabulary in eighteenth-century English, pragmatics and conversation analysis, historical discourse analysis, and cross-cultural discourse analysis.

She welcomes research students who are interested in the English language and the histories of English varieties, and who wish to pursue study in historical sociolinguistics, historical corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, historical discourse analysis, and the history of the English language.