Our Department is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Paul Baker as our Professor of the Department of English and Communication. Professor Baker brings a wealth of expertise and a distinguished record of scholarly excellence to our Department, and we warmly welcome him to the PolyU family.
Paul Baker holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of Central Lancashire (1993), an MSc in Psychological Research Methods from Lancaster University (1994) and a PhD in Linguistics (2001) from Lancaster University. His academic career began at Lancaster University, where he became a lecturer in 2002, going on to become a Professor in 2012, as well as a member of the Corpus Approaches to Social Science ESRC-funded research centre. He joined the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2026.
A leading authority in corpus linguistics, Professor Baker’s research examines corpus approaches to discourse analysis, using a wide range of corpora including newspapers, political debates, patient feedback, online propaganda and forums. He has developed new methods and techniques in corpus linguistics, including the integration of Graph Theory into collocational networks, triangulation methods, multimodal corpora, prototypical texts via keywords, and the concepts of lockwords and surprise words. He has also combined critical AI with corpus linguistics.
Professor Baker has published 26 books and 49 journal articles, and is Commissioning Editor of the Journal Corpora. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. His research on the secret language Polari has been internationally recognised, earning his book Fabulosa a Times Higher Book of the Year Award in 2019. In 2026, he gave a lecture on Polari at the prestigious Darwin College lecture series at Cambridge University. He is consistently ranked among the world’s top 2% of scientists in Communication & Textual Studies (subfield: Languages & Linguistics) on Stanford University’s “World’s Top 2% Scientists” list.
We anticipate the innovative perspectives that Professor Baker will bring to our Department, enhancing our research in Corpus Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis.
