RJ Hellyer

Profile

Project Title: Coming out with it: the relationship between language and emerging identity in young LGBT+ people.

Supervisors: Professor Colleen Cotter and Dr Sophie Holmes-Elliott.

Previous qualifications:

MA Linguistics

Postgraduate Diploma in Education

Member of the Chartered College of Teaching (MCCT)

Research

Research Interests:

Sociolinguistics,

Discourse analysis,

Ethnography,

Language and digital communication,

Language and identity,

Accent and dialect,

Language, gender and sexuality,

Cisheteronormativity.

Publications

Lock, S. J., Jones, E., Hellyer, R. J., & Armstrong, E. (2025). LGBTQ+ staff experiences at UCL: teaching, research and institutional culture. UCL LESG. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10211074  

Hellyer, Robert James. (2025). Creak and embodying gender: A case study of media interviews with an actor before and after coming out as transgender. In F. Venturi (Ed.), Creak: Theories and Practices of Pulse Phonation (pp. 203–230). Jenny Stanford Publishing. 

Hellyer, Robert James. (2023). Third places for queer spaces: LGBTQ+ adolescents and the discursive composition of a community. H-Ermes. Journal of Communication, 24. https://doi.org/10.1285/i22840753n24p7 

Barnard, M., Hellyer, R. J., & Holmes-Elliott, S. (2023). The urge to unmerge: a case of structural change across the lifespan. In R. Skarnitzl & J. Volín (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 3627–3631). Guarant International. https://guarant.cz/icphs2023/442.pdf