María Elena Placencia is Professor of Linguistics and Spanish.  She joined Birkbeck in 1995 and teaches in the areas of (Spanish) Pragmatics,  (Digital) Discourse Analysis as well as Spanish as a foreign language. She has performed different administrative roles, including that of Head of Department/Assistant Dean, and is currently Programme Director of various undergraduate programmes within the Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics. Her current research is in the areas of variational pragmatics, with a focus on e-service encounters, and digital discourse analysis, with a focus on social media interaction. Her latest project examines the language of exclusion on Twitter in the context of interethnic interaction. Past projects have looked at a range of topics including, among others, complimenting behaviour in social media, the discourse of bargaining in e-commerce, rapport management and small talk in service encounters, (im)politeness in familial contexts, addressing behaviour and discursive racism. María Elena has published extensively on these topics.