Emilia Castaño, a lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Barcelona, is joining the Discourse Processing Lab as visiting faculty. She recently arrived and will be here on campus until July 4, 2026. 

Castaño holds a PhD in English philology from the University of Barcelona. Her current research interests include the relationship between general cognition and language, conceptual metaphor, diachronic cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and the cultural and linguistic representations of masculinities. Castaño’s teaching primarily focuses on historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and English descriptive grammar. 

About the research

“Thank you for the warm welcome! I’m really glad to be here. The research I’m working on looks at the role of language, particularly metaphors, in how masculinity is portrayed in nineteenth-century press. I’m interested in how these metaphors helped reinforce normative ideals while marginalizing alternative forms of masculinity. Alongside this, the project also explores contemporary discussions of masculinity in online male-oriented communities, focusing on how masculinity is constructed, reproduced, and contested through metaphor in digital contexts. Bringing these two perspectives together is intended to identify both continuities and changes in how masculinities are metaphorically framed over time.”