Sue Blackwell is a relatively new lecturer in the department of Languages, Literature and Communication.  Her academic background includes Classics, Anthropology, Computer Science and Linguistics; her research is thus primarily multidisciplinary.  She has, on her own admission, an obsession with the little words in a language: her M.Phil. dissertation (University of Cambridge) was about conjunctions while her Ph.D. (University of Birmingham) concerned personal pronouns.  Her research interests include child language acquisition, Critical Discourse Analysis, corpus linguistics and forensic linguistics / language and law.

After some twenty years of teaching at the University of Birmingham Sue moved to the Netherlands, where she taught Forensic Linguistics and other courses at the VU Amsterdam from 2015 to 2019.  She has recently obtained her certificate in teaching Dutch as a second language, after a year's part-time study at the VU.

In her spare time Sue campaigns for human rights and the ethical investment of pension funds.  She also enjoys hiking and cycling.