| ISSFLA PEOPLE

Malcolm Coulthard, ISSFLA Founder & Director of Studies

Professor of Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, where he is Director of the Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Malcolm Coulthard is best known for his work on the analysis of Spoken and Written Discourse and his An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1977/1985) is still widely used. He is the founding editor of The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law and was the Founding President of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. He is the author of 20 authored and edited books, as well as 50 articles and chapters in books, and has supervised numerous PhD dissertations on various aspects of language and law. Malcolm has been commissioned to write reports in over 150 cases including The Birmingham Six, The Derek Bentley Appeal (where, in 1998, the verdict of guilty was overturned after 46 years) and The Bridgewater Four Appeal, and has given expert evidence in courts in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Germany and Hong Kong.

Krzysztof Kredens, Course Director

Dr Krzysztof Kredens received his MA in English Studies and PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Lodz. Formerly a European Commission Research Fellow in the Department of English at Birmingham University, he is now a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the School of Languages and Social Sciences at Aston University, where he also directs the MA in Applied Linguistics programme. His academic interests include corpus linguistics, translation studies and social applications of linguistics. His main research interest lies with language and the law, as evidenced by his numerous publications and conference papers in the area. He is particularly interested in the linguistics of the individual speaker and its implications for forensic authorship analysis. He is Secretary of the International Association of Forensic Linguists.


2010 EDITION TUTORS

Dr Ton Broeders is Professor of Criminalistics at the University of Maastricht, where he is setting up the Maastricht University Forensic Institute. He also holds the chair of Criminalistics at the University of Leiden. His publications deal with a variety of subjects ranging from forensic phonetics and linguistics to forensic science and the evaluation and interpretation of forensic evidence in general. He was Reporting Officer for the 13th and 14th Interpol Forensic Science Symposiums for the field of Forensic Acoustics and Linguistics in 2001 and 2004 and is a member of the editorial board of The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. In addition to acting as court-appointed expert in hundreds of cases in the Netherlands, he has testified in Mauritius and for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
:: Follow this link for a list of Dr Broeders' publications.

Dr Peter French is President of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, a Fellow of the International Society for Phonetic Sciences, a Member of the International Association of Forensic Linguists and a Fellow of the Institute of Acoustics. He is Honorary Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. As one of the world's most experienced experts in the field of forensic speech, language and audio analysis, he carries out work on forensic phonetics, linguistics, sound enhancement and the authentication of recordings.
:: Read about Dr French's involvement in the David Bieber case here.

Dr Tim Grant has qualifications in both linguistics and psychology and is particularly interested in the interaction between forensic linguistics and forensic psychology. He works in the Centre for Forensic Linguistics, Aston University, where he teaches postgraduate courses in forensic linguistics. His main research interests are in forensic authorship analysis and in the conversations which occur between attackers and victims in cases of serious sexual assault and rape. He has publications in both of these areas in both psychology and linguistics journals. His consultancy has largely involved the analysis of abusive and threatening communications in many different contexts including investigations into sexual assaults, murder and terrorist offences. It has also included cases of copyright infringement and academic plagiarism.
:: Click here to watch Tim Grant talk about investigative forensic linguistics.

Dr Kate Haworth qualified as a barrister in 1999. She practised civil and criminal law, including both prosecution and defence work, before moving to the Parliamentary Counsel Office, Whitehall - a small team of specialist lawyers responsible for the drafting of all primary legislation. Combining long-standing interests in both language and law, she received an MA in Applied Linguistics and subsequently a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include all aspects of language and communication in legal contexts, especially spoken interaction and the use of language data as evidence.

Dr Robert A. Leonard is Professor of Linguistics at Hofstra University. He directs the Linguistics Program and the Forensic Linguistics Project. A member of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, he has testified and consulted for both prosecution and defense in criminal cases of murder, espionage, and other felonies, and in civil cases of plagiarism, libel, malpractice and the meaning of contracts. He has been consulted in some well-known cases such as the Taye Diggs-Idina Menzel arson threat letters, the McGuire “suitcase” murder (in which he prepared testimony to bolster the FBI expert), and the Alvarez spy case (in which he prepared testimony against FBI interrogators).
:: Click here to watch a video of Dr Leonard talking about one of the cases where he provided linguistic evidence.

Dr Mike Scott received his PhD in Linguistics and Modern English Language from the University of Lancaster in 1991. He is Reader in Corpus Linguistics at Aston Univeristy. He spent 19 years as Lecturer and then Reader in the English Language Unit and School of English at the University of Liverpool. He is perhaps best known as the author of WordSmith Tools, a suite of programs for the analysis of language corpora. He is Chair of the Association for Language Awareness
:: Dr Scott's website.