I have degrees from the University of Edinburgh (MA), Sheffield (PhD) and Queen's University Belfast (PGHET). I have held teaching and research positions at the University of Bonn, Sheffield, Queen's University Belfast, TU Dresden, and since 2018 as professor at the University of Vienna and since 2020 additionally as guest professor at Klagenfurt University. I have been a partner in the International Corpus of English project since its inception in 1989 and recently completed a major review of it. I compiled its all-Ireland component and went onto create a daughter corpus, the SPICE-Ireland Corpus, in which the data were pragmatically and prosodically annotated. As a corpus linguist and dialectologist, my research focuses in Scots and Scottish English, Irish English, and World Englishes.