Academic Skills Center

Laura Straková is completing her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham, UK (expected 2012).  She earned an M.A. in Rhetoric and Linguistics (cum laude) from the Catholic University of America in 1994, and a B.A. in Philosophy (summa cum laude) from the same university in 1989.  She has taught graduate and undergraduate level academic writing, presentation skills, and research skills for the social sciences and humanities at various colleges in the Washington DC area, at George Mason University, Virginia, and at Montgomery College, Maryland from 1997 until joining CERGE-EI in 2001.   She is contributing author and editor of Thinking and Writing (Brandywine Press, 1998) and editor on various projects.

Research orientation:

Corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, discourse semantics, the application of empirical text analysis in social and critical theory.