I work in pragmatics, the study of how meaning is communicated and understood in natural language use. My research examines the interactions between pragmatics and affective science, focusing on how conceptual representations, appraisal processes, and multimodal cues converge to shape the interpretation of utterances. 

My PhD thesis explores the role of mental imagery in poetic metaphors, focusing on how non-conceptual representations can feed back into pragmatic processing. I am currently part of the Leverhulme Research Project which seeks to offer a cognitively grounded account of affective communication. 

Before going back to the university, I was a staff writer/associate editor for a small company based in Beijing. I wrote about science fiction and popular culture.