I have been a Professeur des Universités at the University of Lille 3/University of Lille since 2001. From 2001 till 2009, I worked in the Applied Languages Department (Langues Etrangères Appliquées, LEA), where I set up a Masters in computer-assisted translation and project management (Master en Traduction Spécialisée Multilingue: technologies et gestion de projets) and was course director until 2009. In 2009, the Master TSM was admitted to the network of the European Masters in Translation (EMT). Since 2009, I have mainly taught in the English Department (Faculté LCS, Langues, Cultures et Sociétés, Département Angellier). I was appointed Vice-Chancellor for research at the University of Lille SHS in June 2016 and held this position until January 2018, when the three Lille universities merged into University of Lille. I was deputy director of the research group Savoirs, Textes, Langage (STL) from January 2018 till February 2020.

My main research field is pragmatics, both theoretical and applied.

I was the principal investigator of an ANR-FNS funded project on English Modals, for which the French team collaborated with colleagues from the Université de Neuchâtel (Martin Hilpert, principal investigator). The end of project co-authored book was published in April 2023, Modals of modals. From pragmatics and corpus linguistics to machine learning (Mouton de Gruyter).

My current reserach projects relate to hedged performatives, healthcare practitioner-child communication and complaints (in business and political online discourse). All of my projects involve international collaboration, with colleagues from the University of Gent and UZGent, KULeuven and UZLeuven, the University of Graz and the University of Kent. 

I take a keen interest in the teaching of English grammar, and have co-authored a grammar with Chad Langford (Advanced English grammar. A linguistic approach, Bloomsbury, 2020, 2nd edition).