Associate ProfessorRosemary Huisman

Rosemary Huisman is Honorary Associate Professor in English at the University of Sydney. She was, before retirement, Head of Semiotics at that university. She has published widely on poetry and poetics, from Beowulf to contemporary poetry (as in The Written Poem, Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English, 1999 & 2000) and herself publishes poetry. Her research interests include the theory of language as social semiotic, and in particular its application to the study of English literary and legal discourse. Earlier work on narrative focused on its use in different media (as in six chapters in the co-authored book, Narrative and Media, Cambridge U.P. 2005). Her most recent publication, the book Narrative Worlds and the Texture of Time, A Social-Semiotic Perspective (Routledge, 2022), brings together a modelling of time with a modelling of language to produce a new model of narrative, which is then used to compare English texts from manuscript, print and digital cultures. Her studies of legal discourse include papers on statutory interpretation ("Linguistic perspectives on legal 'construction': the advantages of a social-semiotic approach", 2021) and on the language of legal rights and obligation ("Modality and the Law", 2014), and a book chapter on judicial reasoning ("The trace of time in judicial reasoning: a case of conflicting argument in the High Court of Australia (Al Kateb v. Godwin, 2004)", Brill 2016).