• socio-pragmatics
• situated learning
• leadership discourse
• language use in sport
• linguistic ethnography
• taboo language
• (im)politeness
• gender and language
• language in the workplace
• language variation and change
• discourse and social inclusion

Nick is a sociolinguist by background and has conducted research predominantly in the area of sports discourse and language in the workplace. Originally from Scotland, where he attended the University of Edinburgh, he has worked in universities in the UK, New Zealand and Australia before coming to the University of Limerick. Nick carried out his doctoral research in New Zealand, as part of the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project, where he conducted a year-long ethnography of a rugby team and analysed how leadership communication is negotiated and how new leaders forge their skills through a process of situated learning. This project has led to multiple publications on topics such as address terms, pronoun usage and leadership emergence. Following on from this, Nick has also worked on language and communication research with other sports organisations, such as Street Football Wales, a charity that works towards fostering social inclusion for homeless people through sports participation. He has a wide range of research interests beyond his core expertise, having collaborated with other researchers to work on topics including lip-reading in artificial intelligence and neurodiversity in language learning design. Nick has taught sociolinguistics and discourse analysis in various universities and is the co-author with Janet Holmes of the popular sociolinguistics textbook An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.