Robin Wooffitt
Professor Emeritus

Profile

Biography

After a DPhil in Sociology at the University of York, Robin worked as a Research Fellow, then Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey.

He took up his post at York in October, 2002, and was promoted to Professor in 2009. In 2024 he took early retirement, and became Professor Emeritus. He is also Visiting Professor at the Centre for Psychology and Sociological Sciences at the University of Northampton. He continues to be research active.

His latest book, Everyday Telepathy (Reaktion Books) comes out in March 2027, and is his first book for the general public.

Research

Overview

Robin has a long standing interest in language in interaction. He has published widely on conversation analysis, including Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications (2008 2^nd, edition with Ian Hutchby), Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction (2005), The Language of Youth Subcultures (1995, with Sue Widdicombe) and Bridging the Gap between Conversation Analysis and Poetics: Studies in Talk-In-Interaction and Literature Twenty-Five Years after Jefferson (2022, co-edited with Ray Person and John Rae).

Throughout his career, Robin has been interested in the relationship between language, interaction and extraordinary experiences and psychological states, and has published on reports of anomalous phenomena (Telling Tales of the Unexpected: The Organisation of Factual Discourse 1992), psychic practitioners (The Language of Mediums and Psychics, 2006), introspection in ESP experiments (Looking In and Speaking Out (2011, with Nicola Holt) and onsite investigations of spiritual phenomena (Making Sense of the Paranormal: The Interactional Construction of Unexplained Experiences (2011, with Rachael Ironside). He is currently writing a book on the relationship between telepathy and speech errors (probably out late 2025/early 2026).