Elin McCready received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. She worked as a posdoctoral researcher at Osaka University and then took a position at Aoyama Gakuin University in 2006, where she became Professor in 2015. She is an ICREA Research Professor at the Centre de Lingüística Teòrica at UAB as of 2025. Her academic interests are in linguistics, philosophy, environmental humanities, and artistic research.
Research interests
My research is primarily on semantics and pragmatics. In the past years, I have focused on three main questions: the semantics and pragmatics of social meanings, especially in political speech; the application of semantic and pragmatic tools to art and literature; and embodiment and anthropocentrism in language. I am currently engaged in extensions of these projects and in the modeling of embodiment in language.
Selected publications
– McCready E 2025, Antinormative Interpretation, Palgrave Macmillan.
– McCready E & Rosina EE 2025, Masking as Persona Flexibility. In Contemporary Philosophy of Autism. Anderson JL & Cushing S, eds., Routledge. Chapter 9 pp. 165–184
– McCready E 2025 ‘Jinshinkai ni okeru ronritekina jujutsu no arikata [Ethical spellcasting in the Anthropocene]’, in Moa Zan Hyuuman no Monogatari [Stories of the More-than-human], Masami Yuki, ed., Minerva Shobo, pp. 247-264.
Selected research activities
Invited talks:
2025. Register, Honorification and Formality. Humboldt Universität. November 11.
2025. Associative Slurs: Ideology and Valence. ZAS Berlin. October 31.
2025. Associative Slurs: Thick Terms, Valence and Ideology. Valence Asymmetries Seminar. Universitat Pompeu Fabra. September 23.
2025. Somatic Update. XPRAG Fest. ZAS Berlin. July 18.
2025. Social Self-Location. University of Bielefeld. July 16.
2025. Slurs: Indexicality and Somatics. University of Potsdam. June 17.
2025. Slurs: Denotation, Index, Invocation. Keio University. June 6.
2025. Slurs, Indexicality and Normativity. Knormgens: Konstanz Workshop on Normative Generics. May 22.
2025. Slurs, Invocations and Identities. Slurring Terms Across Languages Seminar. April 7. With C. Davis.
2025. Honorifics and Norms. CHAMP. Universitat Pompeu Fabra. March 29.
Submitted presentations:
2025. Explicitness, Honorification and Indices. LENLS 31. Nagoya University. With A. Machado y Prieter and G. Varaschin. November 28.
2025. When I am you: Deriving honorifics through weak indices. NELS. With A. Machado y Prieter and
G. Varaschin. October 19. Presented by G. Varaschin.
2025. Reading Thick and Thin Registers. AFLA 32. Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. June 4.