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I'm a linguistic anthropologist who studies how communicative events in Indonesia figure in the building and maintenance of social relationships and common knowledge among Indonesians. During my PhD and post-PhD early years my research often involved long periods of fieldwork in Indonesia. As research funding and sabbatical have become scarce, I have increasingly turned to publically available data, such as Indonesian films, newspapers, social media and so on. I have published extensively on my research, including Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2015), Global Leadership Talk: Constructing Good Governance in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2020); Reimagining Rapport (Oxford University Press, 2021); Rapport and the discursive co-construction of social relations in fieldwork settings (Mouton De Gruyter, 2019); and Contact Talk: The Discursive Organization of Contact and Boundaries (with Deborah Cole and Howard Manns, Routledge, 2020).

I am an applied linguist specializing in intercultural and public health communication. I am deeply engaged in using multimodal discourse analysis to understand how language, gestures, eye gaze, and material objects co-create meaning in social life. Previously, I investigated the processes of language and cultural learning in multilingual settings, such as studying abroad and language classrooms.

My recent work focuses on communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have published in top-tier international journals on public health topics, including mask wearing as well as reporting and narrating pandemic events. My COVID-19 project draws on over 600 hours of press-conference recordings and more than two million public online comments to understand what worked and did not in public health crisis communication. In 2025, I published a research monograph, Health crisis communication: Multimodal classification for pandemicpreparedness. The book examines the role of multimodal classification in promoting pandemic preparedness and provides a list of ready-to-use strategies for explaining pandemic categories to the public. The book received the 2025 High Distinction Award from the Taiwan Association of Medical History.

My new project examines how health professionals communicate infectious diseases to high-risk populations: children, pregnant women, and older adults with underlying health conditions. This involves analyzing video recordings of health consultations and conducting interviews with clinicians and individuals from high-risk groups. The goal of the project is to develop tailored communication strategies and guidelines for effectively conveying health information, including vaccination, to these populations.

My research on public health communication has been recognized by the 2021 Humanities Traveling Fellowship from the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the 2025 Young Scholar Research Award from the North America Taiwanese Professors' Association (NATPA).

I am available to supervise PhD/MPhil/Honours projects on the following topics: health discourses, intercultural communication, and language learning and teaching. Please contact me to discuss your proposal.