Current teaching: Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods & Data Analysis; Applied Research Projects; Critical Perspectives on Management Communication; Key Concepts in International Business Communication

Go to eVVZ for Gillings’ current lectures.

About

Mathew Gillings is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Language and Discourse in Business at the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, where he teaches on the MSc in Business Communication. Before joining the WU, Mathew completed his PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University (UK), where he was also employed as an Associate Lecturer teaching on the undergraduate English Language and Corporate Communication modules. As a member of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, Mathew was involved with various corpus compilation projects, including the Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project and the Written BNC2014.

He is a member of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), International Communication Association (ICA), and a member of the Research Committee for the Association for Business Communication (ABC). He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, member of the editorial board for the Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies, and can be found on X at: @mathewgillings.

Other professional activity includes holding workshops as part of the WU in-house faculty training programme, engaging in language analysis consultancy, (academic) proofreading and coaching. In doing so, he has worked with a number of organisations both in the UK, and across the DACH region.

Research Interests

Mathew’s research interests are located broadly within the field of corpus linguistics, a method used to analyse large amounts of naturally-occurring discourse data both quantitatively and qualitatively. His previous and ongoing research combines the method with:

1. (Critical) discourse analysis, examining societal discourses on a large scale (e.g., climate change discourse, business discourse, political discourse, media discourse);

2. Forensic linguistics, including deception and communicating wrongdoing in times of crisis;

3. (Im)politeness, in particular how practices vary across a range of social groups (e.g., across speakers, settings, regions, cultures).

 

Much of this work takes a methodological angle, examining the differing epistemologies of a range of research methods commonly used throughout linguistics and communications. This has included, for example, exploring how results derived from corpus-assisted investigations can complement those derived from more qualitative discourse analytical close reading, or those from more quantitative approaches such as topic modelling and LLMs. A key focus is on interdisciplinary collaboration, exploring how corpus linguistic techniques can be applied to different areas of linguistics and communications, the humanities, social sciences, and beyond.

In February 2025, Mathew was featured as part of the WU's "Meet our Researchers" series.

A full list of publications and research activities can be found in PURE.