Prof. Teasdale is an Anglo-Irish doctor of Sociology who grew up in West Yorkshire in the North of England. Studying Modern History at the University of Oxford he was particularly interested in the intersections between race and gender in language, his undergraduate thesis on Early Modern England’s depiction of Sub-Saharan Africans and Native Americans would later be published as a book under the title ‘Unruly Women, Unruly Race.’ This interest in the deployment of language in the construction of ‘Otherness’ continued throughout a Master’s degree in Development and Finance and a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Sapienza, Rome.
Prof. Teasdale’s current research interests revolve around the semiotics of media, with a particular focus on the presentation of migrants in print newspapers. Deploying a mix of frame analysis and cognitive psychology Prof. Teasdale, in his doctoral work, attempted to investigate how migrants and migration were depicted, and how this depiction changed, in the run-up to and fallout of the Brexit campaign and referendum in Britain. Overlapping qualitative, quantitative, inductive, and deductive enquiry within a computer-based text mining approach, this work demonstrates how geographical and demographical factors colored this depiction of ‘Others’ in Modern Britain.
Prof. Teasdale teaches classes on a range of topics related to these research interests across different institutions. These classes include Text Mining (John Cabot), the Sociology of Crime and Deviance, Crime and Deviance in the Media (John Cabot), Intersectionality, and the Sociology of the Mafia. Prof. Teasdale also teaches English composition at all levels, with a keen focus on helping students deploy academic English effectively and efficiently as they aim to capture and exhibit their own interests and research for others.
