Professor Kay O'Halloran

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Kay O’Halloran joined the University of Liverpool as Chair Professor and Head of Department of Communication and Media in the School of the Arts in August 2019. She is also Co-Director of the Digital Media and Society Institute (DMSI). Prior to this, she worked at Curtin University, Western Australia (2013-2019) and the National University of Singapore where she was a member of the Department of the English Language & Literature (1998-2013), Director of the Multimodal Analysis Lab in the Interactive & Digital Media Institute (2007-2013) and Deputy Director of Interactive & Digital Media Institute (2012-2013).

Kay is an internationally recognized leading academic in the field of multimodal analysis, involving the study of the interaction of language with other resources in texts, interactions and events (e.g. text, images, video, websites). Her early work involved multimodal approaches to mathematics, including the study of the historical evolution of mathematics discourse, the semantic expansions of meaning arising from the interaction of language, images and mathematical symbolism in mathematical texts, and multimodal literacy. Following this work, she has focused on the development of new digital tools and techniques for multimodal analysis and mixed methods approaches for analysis of large multimodal data sets.

Kay has decades of experience as a Research Director of interdisciplinary teams (i.e. social scientists, scientists, computer scientists, graphic designers and software developers) working on digital approaches to multimodal analysis. She has secured competitive funding from grantors that include the National Research Foundation (Singapore), Ministry of Education (Singapore), United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, Australian Technology Network, Department of Defence (Australia), the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University (Germany), and AVIVA through The Pandemic Institute (Liverpool, UK).

She has over 150 publications in key international journals and with leading publishers. She is the founding editor of the Routledge Studies in Multimodality research book series which has published 57 books with further forthcoming volumes. She has given over 50 plenary and keynote presentations and 60 invited seminars and workshops in Australia, Asia, Europe, North America and South America.

For further information, please see: Wikipedia: Kay O'Halloran | Google Scholar: Kay O'Halloran