Francesca Bargiela (francesca.bargiela@ntu.ac.uk) is senior research fellow in the department of English and Media Studies, Nottingham Trent University. Her research has covered aspects of intercultural pragmatics, managerial discourse and organisational communication in Italian and British companies. Her publications on spoken and written business discourse include: Managing Language: the Discourse of Corporate Meeting, Benjamins 1997 and The Languages of Business: an International Perspective, EUP, 1997, (both with Sandra Harris) and Writing Business: Genres, Media and Discourses, Longman, 1999 (with Catherine Nickerson). She is guest editor of three special journal issues: on business discourse for the Journal of Business Communication (with C. Nickerson, 2002, forthcoming); on organizational discourse for the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2003, in preparation) and on language in intercultural business communication for the Journal of Intercultural Studies (2003, in preparation).

Corinne Boz (corinneboz@hotmail.com) graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in 1995 with a BA in English Studies and went on to gain an MA in Linguistics from Hacettepe University, Ankara, in 1999. After working as Director of the Writing Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, she has returned to the UK to work on her PhD at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research is focused on issues of power and cultural identity in second language writing.

Christine Christie (c.christie@lboro.ac.uk) on linguistics at Loughborough University. Her research interests include pragmatics, politeness, audience interpretation of media texts, feminism, and gender & language use. Her publications include articles and essays that focus on each these research areas and a book Gender and Language: Towards a Feminist Pragmatics Edinburgh University Press 2000. She is currently researching women and men's use of public discourse.

Karen Grainger (k.p.grainger @shu.ac.uk) is Senior Lecturer in the dept. of Communication Studies, specialising in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. She obtained her PhD from the University of Wales in the area of interactional sociolinguistics ("The Discourse of Elderly Care") and has since published on aspects of communication between nurses and elderly patients. Her current research interests are in institutional discourse analysis.

Abdurrahman Hamza (abdul.hamza@student.shu.ac.uk) is a Libyan, graduated in 1986 with a BA in Linguistics from the University of Sebha. In 1995 he obtained his MA in applied Linguistics at the University of Liverpool, Department of English Language and Literature. After working as lecturer at the University of Sebha for more than three years, he is now a PhD student at Sheffield Hallam University researching cross-cultural aspects of politeness used between Arab and English people. His research interests are Sociolinguistics and pragmatics, Arabic Literature, Phonology, and all aspects of Applied Linguistics. He has published with Mr Jalal Al-Deen (1999) Living Stories. He is working on the Communicative Approach: Practising Teachers’ Perceptions versus the Theory, and Introducing Pronunciation in A Foreign Language Classroom.

Sandra Harris (sandra.harris@ntu.ac.uk) is Head of the Department of English and Media Studies and also the Dean of Graduate Studies at Nottingham Trent University. She has a longstanding interest in institutional and strategic discourse and is the author of Managing Language: the Discourse of Corporate Meetings (1997) and The Languages of Business: an International Perspective (1997, with Francesca Bargiela) and has contributed a large number of articles in this field to various journals and edited collections. She is also a member of the national executive committee of the UK Council for Graduate Education.

Andrew Merrison (a.merrison@yorksj.ac.uk) graduated in 1991 with a BA in Language & Linguistics from the University of York. From there, he went to Edinburgh where postgraduate study yielded an MSc in Cognitive Science & Natural Language and finally a PhD in Linguistics. His areas of interest centre around talk-in-interaction: conversation analysis, discourse analysis, disordered language, politeness and other aspects of sociolinguistics. He has taught at universities in Durham, Edinburgh, and York and is currently a lecturer in linguistics at York St John College.

Sara Mills (s.l.mills@shu.ac.uk) is Research Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research interests are feminist linguistics and feminist post-colonial theory. She has published Discourse (1997); Feminist Stylistics (1997); Discourses of Difference: Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (1991); and with Pearce (1996) Feminist Readings/Feminists Reading and with Montgomery et al. (2000) Ways of Reading. At present she is working on: Rethinking Gender and Politeness, Michel Foucault and Third Wave Feminist Linguistics and the Analysis of Sexism.

Louise Mullany (louise.mullany@ntu.ac.uk) is currently completing a PhD at Nottingham Trent University. Her research interests include language and gender, discourse analysis, pragmatics and stylistics. She has previously published articles on politeness and language and gender, and her PhD research investigates the discourse strategies female and male managers use to construct their gender identities in workplace interaction. She also teaches part-time at the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University.