Rate My Professor Dawn Knight

Professor Dawn Knight holds a BA, MA and PhD from the University of Nottingham and is Professor in Applied Linguistics at Cardiff University. She has been employed at Cardiff University since 2015 as a member of the Centre for Language and Communication Research in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy. Professor Knight serves as University Dean of Research Environment and Culture and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW, elected 2023). She previously served as Chair of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) from 2018 to 2021 and holds roles including membership of the ESRC Strategic Advisory Network, ESRC and AHRC Peer Review Colleges, and various leadership positions in research funding and impact at Cardiff University.

Her research specializations include corpus linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and multimodality, with a particular focus on the development of linguistic corpora for the Welsh language. As Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator she has secured approximately £4.3 million in external funding for projects including the ESRC/AHRC-funded CorCenCC (National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh) project, which created a large-scale open-source corpus of contemporary Welsh, as well as recent Welsh Government and AHRC-funded initiatives developing digital tools for Welsh language analysis, readability assessment, sentiment analysis and bilingual text processing. Professor Knight has authored or co-authored numerous publications, including books such as Corpus Linguistics for Virtual Workplace Discourse (2025) and chapters in major reference works on corpus linguistics and applied linguistics. Her work has advanced methodological frameworks for analysing linguistic data and has supported real-world applications in language learning, public health messaging and cultural heritage. She is available for postgraduate supervision.