Arianna Maiorani

Reader in Linguistics and Multimodality, Loughborough University
Arianna Maiorani joined Loughborough University in 2008. Born in Rome, Italy, she holds an MA in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and a PhD in Cultural Sciences from the International School of High Studies of the San Carlo Foundation in Modena, Italy.

Before joining Loughborough University, she taught English Language, Linguistics, Multimodality and Translation at the University of Bologna “Alma Mater Studiorum” and the University of Rome “La Sapienza” for many years.

She is also an ex professional ballet dancer, teacher and choreographer and holds a diploma from the Ballet School of the Opera Theatre of Rome. In 2014, she created the community cast choreography for Michael Pinchbeck’s Bolero.

She speaks Italian, English, French and Spanish and has worked as a professional translator for international publishers for many years. Her book for children Il Manuale della Giovane Ballerina (The Handbook of the Young Dancer), published in 1996 by Mondadori, has now become a collectible item.

Dr Maiorani’s main research interests are Multimodality, Linguistics, Social Semiotics, and the Semiotics of Dance and Performance. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary work that focuses on the application of linguistic and semiotic analytical frameworks to the study of multimodal discourse strategies.

Between 2012 and 2014 she took part in an international research projects on The Languages of Film with the University of Pavia (IT) and the University of Malta.

After leading an interdisciplinary pilot project in Dance Discourse in 2017 in collaboration with the English National Ballet, she is currently leading a AHRC-DFG interdisciplinary collaborative project involving Loughborough University and Bremen University (Germany) entitled The Kinesemiotic Body: a pragmatic account of the local discourse organisation of dance( Kinesemiotics: Modelling How Choreographed Movement Means in Space | English | Loughborough University (lboro.ac.uk) ). In collaboration with Massimiliano Zecca (Loughborough University) and Russell Lock (Loughborough University) she created the interdisciplinary research area of Kinesemiotics. The Loughborough team is currently working on Kinesemiotics with the Bremen team led by John Bateman (Kinesemiotic Body - Universität Bremen (uni-bremen.de).