Dr Jessica Bradley

Profile 

I am Senior Lecturer in Literacies and Language in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield where I teach across undergraduate, postgraduate taught and research programmes. I have been deputy director of the EdD since 2022 and since 2023 I have been co-director of Internationalisation.  I was co-director of the BA in Education, Culture and Childhood 2020-2024. From 2019-2022 I co-directed the Literacies Research Cluster. In 2018 I was awarded my AHRC-funded PhD which focused on the sociolinguistic concept of translanguaging in production and performance in community arts. In my thesis I examined the multilingual and multimodal communicative practices of street artists as they worked together to create a production, which was then performed across Slovenia in 2015. My doctorate was part of the wider AHRC-funded Translation and Translanguaging project (2014-2018, PI Angela Creese) and I studied for it at the University of Leeds. I hold the title of Docent in Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, since June 2024. 

I am an experienced university teacher, having taught in a range of institutions since 2005, including for a decade in widening participation and outreach at the University of Leeds. I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, awarded in January 2022. 

Though my research engages with a number of fields, I describe myself as an interdisciplinary linguist and ethnographer, with particular research interests in creative practice and the arts. My research expertise is in creative and artistic methods, ethnographic approaches and multilingualism, in particular lived experiences of multilingualism and I research in collaboration with colleagues internationally. In 2021 I was invited visiting research fellow in the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. With Emilee Moore and Lou Harvey I co-founded the AILA Research Network for Creative Inquiry and Applied Linguistics in 2018 which brought together linguists working with, into and through the arts and artists working with ideas of language (see my book chapter on this, co-written with Lou Harvey, here). 

I am also interested in experiences of mother(parent)hood and artistic engagements with and representations of being a mother. My first (non-academic) publication (2015) was a prize-winning memoir of early parenthood (The First Winter). I am currently working on 'Re-Emerge' (NHS Leeds Hospitals Trust, 2022-2023), a project which explores the role of community arts in re-emergence from the COVID19 pandemic, led by The Art House, Wakefield. My recent research has explored young people's everyday engagements with language (Multilingual Streets, 2019-2021) and artistic representations of multilingualism (Visual Representations of Multilingualism, 2018-2019). 

I live in West Yorkshire with my husband, two daughters and family dog, Luna the cockapoo. I'm not from Yorkshire, though - I was born in Stoke on Trent in the heart of the Potteries in the 1980s.

Images at the top of each page of this website are from research projects. They have been created by Louise Atkinson, unless otherwise stated.