Professor

Bio

Cornelia Ilie recently joined Zayed University as a Full Professor of Business Communication in the College of Business. Prior to that she was Full Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Malmö, Sweden. She also lived in the United Kingdom, where she taught and did research as Visiting Fellow at Lancaster University (1990-1991), and in the United States, as a post-doc Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley (1996-1997). She has held Visiting Professorships at several prestigious universities: Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain; University of Jyväskylä, Finland; University of Vienna, Austria; University of Bucharest, Romania; Luiss University, Rome; IMT Lucca, and Scuola.Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy. 

She is the Founder and President of ESTIDIA (European Society for Transcultural and Interdisciplinary Dialogue), Consultation Board member of IPrA (International Pragmatics Association), Board member of IADA (International Association for Dialogue Analysis), and member of the Reference Group of Experts on Higher Education and Education For All for the IAU (International Association of Universities). She serves on the editorial board of several refereed academic journals (Journal of Argumentation in Context - JAIC; Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - JLAC; Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines - CADAAD; Cogency: Journal of Reasoning and Argumentation; International Journal of Cross-cultural Studies and Environmental Communication - IJCCSEC; International Journal of Language Studies - IJLS) and has coordinated several international research projects (the most recent of which are ‘Assuming Citizenship Roles: Deliberative Dialogues in Schools’ and ‘GENPARDIS (Gender and Parliamentary Discourse Practices). Her most recent international research collaboration was within the framework of the EU-COST project entitled ‘Improving Written Communication in Education and in the Workplace’. Professor Ilie has organised or co-organised over 12 international conferences and 24 panels/workshops. She is regularly invited to act as a keynote speaker at international conferences, and as an external examiner of research proposals, of academic job applications, and of PhD dissertations defended at universities in Europe, Asia and Australia.

Office

Abu Dhabi - Khalifa City, FF1-2-016

Email:

Teaching Areas

Business Communication (intercultural communication, leadership communication, communication in the workplace)

Research and Professional Activities

Her research interests are largely interdisciplinary, focusing on pragmatics, discourse analysis, cross-cultural rhetoric and professional writing. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and volumes on institutional discourses (particularly political, media and academic discourses), intercultural communication strategies, as well as rhetoric and argumentation in dialogue. Her recent publications include: The use of English in institutional and business settings: An intercultural perspective (Peter Lang, 2007); European parliaments under scrutiny: Discourse strategies and interaction practices (John Benjamins, 2010); Evolving genres in web-mediated communication (Peter Lang, 2012); Genres and genre theory in transition: Specialized discourses across media and modes (BrownWalker, 2014); International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, 3 volumes (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015).

She is currently doing research on organizational practices and leadership discourses in a cross-cultural perspective. Her ongoing RIF project is entitled “An investigation of the challenges of customer-centric multichannel banking in the UAE and Italy: Enhancing communication skills”.