World literature; cross-cultural literary representation; travel writing; Western ideas and images of China; translingual theory and practice; study of literary and linguistic globalization; World Englishes.

Sociolinguistics; discourse analysis; World Englishes; corpus-linguistics; the politics and ideology of language; language and the law; language and gender; cognitive sociolinguistics, English grammar; construction grammar; grammaticalization; Integrational linguistics; philosophy of language; phonetics, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition.

Language and culture; theories of communication; intercultural communication; language in workplace and institutional settings; politeness.

Literary and cultural studies and theory; medieval literature, renaissance literature; Romanticism; Victorianism; modernism; postmodernism; the English novel; English poetry; feminist approaches to literature; American literature; contemporary British fiction; Hong Kong and other Asian literatures in English; postcolonial literatures; travel writing; creative writing; drama.