Janny H. C. Leung is Dean of Liberal Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she is also Professor of Law and Society and Professor of English. She was Professor of Linguistics in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She obtained her M Phil and PhD in English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge, an LLB from the University of London, and an LLM from Yale Law School.
She was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute, the Faculty of Law of McGill University, and a Luce East Asia Fellow at the National Humanities Center (USA).
Broadly speaking, her research has revolved around the study of meaning. Her first line of research, developed from her doctoral work, focuses on the mapping between meaning and linguistic form in the acquisition and processing of language, using a psycholinguistic approach and a quantitative methodology. She was a founding member of the University of Hong Kong’s Speech, Language and Cognition Laboratory.
Her second and most current line of research lies in the emergent interdisciplinary area of language and law. She has published a monograph and a series of papers on challenges, ideologies and paradoxes in multilingual legal practice. She has also written about language rights, legal interpretation, unrepresented litigation, courtroom discourse, legal translation, and representations of law in the media. Her current government-funded project deals with the evolution of law in the modern communication environment.
Selected publications:
Leung, J. (2019) Shallow equality and symbolic jurisprudence in multilingual legal orders. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Leung, J. (2019). Does the world need more Canada? Legal multilingualism and strategic pluralism. Sherbrooke Law Review / Revue de droit de l’Université de Sherbrooke, 47 (2-3), 193-226.
Leung, J., & Durant, A. (Eds.) (2018) Meaning and power in the language of law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Durant, A., & Leung, J. (2016) Language and law. London, UK: Routledge.
Work for CID:
Janny Leung wrote a guest post on COVID-sensitive kanji.
She is an American journalism historian who studies news as an agent of democracy, specializing in English- and Spanish-language news, the immigrant press, and coverage of underrepresented groups. Garza is the author of the award-winning They Came to Toil: Newspaper Representations of Mexicans and Immigrants in the Great Depression (University of Texas Press, 2018). They Came to Toil examines English- and Spanish-language news coverage of immigrants during the longest economic downturn in the United States. She is a founding faculty member of TCU’s interdisciplinary department of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES). Her work has been published in Journalism History, American Journalism, and the Howard Journal of Communications.
Her MA research at the University of Sheffield, UK focuses on the role of Intercultural Communication in Multi Stakeholder platforms and will complement her prior work experience in multicultural and intercultural settings.
Her areas of interest include intercultural communication, interpersonal communication, and conflict management. Specifically, she explores how communication—specifically, how we communicate about difference—serves as both an instrument and a barrier to inclusion and belonging. Along with having taught several intercultural communication courses at various institutions, Salma has also held several non-academic, professional positions with local and international organizations in the field of conflict mediation and cross-cultural dialogue.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 