Janice Carruthers is Professor of French Linguistics at Queen's and Leadership Fellow in Modern Languages with the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

She took her BA in Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University (St Catharine’s College), where she subsequently took an MPhil in Linguistics, followed by a PhD in French Linguistics under the supervision of Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett. She was appointed to Queen’s in 1989 where she teaches and researches in French Language and Linguistics. She was Head of the School of Modern Languages from 2011 to 2016. 

Her main research interests and most of her outputs are in the following areas:

• the linguistic structure of oral narrative in French, particularly tense, aspect, temporal and spatial framing, negation, detachment, inversion, parataxis/hypotaxis, and speech and thought presentation;
• sociolinguistics (language policy in France and the UK; language and identity in France);
• corpus linguistics (notably in digital annotation using the Text Encoding Initiative);
• oral genres (particularly the linguistic features of different types of spoken French);
• language variation and change in French.  

Janice's AHRC Fellowship involves a three-year funded project on language policy, entitled 'Foreign, Indigenous and Community Languages in the Devolved Regions of the UK: Policy and Practice for Growth'. In addition to this research project where the team includes two postdoctoral fellows, she is active in the area of language policy in the UK. She has co-organised Policy Workshops with Wendy Ayres-Bennett (Cambridge) and has published two Policy Briefings. She is the AHRC lead in a 5-way collaboration on proposals for a National Languages Strategy for the UK, working with the British Academy, the British Council, Universities UK and the Association of School and College Leaders. Janice is also a member of the British Academy Languages Advisory Group and Chair of the Institute for Modern Languages Research Advisory Council. She has recently been a member of the British Academy Arabic Mapping Steering Group and the Language Trends NI Steering Group, both of which have published reports (2018 and 2019 respectively).  

Janice is Deputy Principal Investigator and Strand Lead on the Queen's strand of the AHRC-funded Open World Research Initiative project, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies, working with partners in Cambridge, Nottingham and Edinburgh.  The Queen's team includes two postdocs and two PhD students, all working in the area of language, identity and social cohesion in France and Ireland. She has recently been Principal Investigator on a Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodovska Curie Fellowship held by Marianne Vergez-Couret, exploring the concept of orality in contemporary storytelling in Occitan and French.

Janice has recently supervised PhDs on temporal patterning in sports commentary, on information structuring in French and Dagara oral narratives, on linguistic borrowing in different text-types and registers, on lexical creativity in young speakers in urban France, on the language of cosmetics advertising in women's magazines and on the discourse of asylum seekers. She is currently supervising a project on language policy in France (specifically in relation to Breton) and is second supervisor on a project on the inflence of Irish-language radio on social cohesion across the Gaeltachts. 

Janice is on the Editorial Board of 'Modern Languages Open' (LUP) and ‘Discours’ (CNRS). She is a member of the International Advisory Board of the ‘Journal of French Language Studies’ (CUP), having been an Editor and Associate Editor for many years.  She was on the Editorial Boards of French Studies (OUP) and the Legenda Research Monographs in French series for ten years. She has been External Examiner at Undergraduate level at Cambridge University, in the University of Sheffield, in University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin. She has recently examined PhDs in Cambridge, Exeter and Orleans.