Dr. Pilar Blitvich Awarded Chancellor’s Professorship

The English Department is very happy to announce that Dr. Pilar Blitvich has been awarded a Chancellor’s Professorship here at UNC Charlotte. The title of Chancellor’s Professor is one of the university’s highest honors. It is conferred upon a tenured full professor of national and international distinction whose work has interdisciplinary reach and a record of outstanding contributions to the university community. It is a lifetime appointment.

Dr. Blitvich’s academic work is rooted in linguistic pragmatics. From its beginnings in the mid twentieth century, the field has spanned multiple domains, drawing on psychology and cognition to understand language interpretation, and on history, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology to illuminate the situational factors shaping language use. This broad theoretical foundation has enabled Dr. Blitvich to apply pragmatic models to complex contemporary issues such as interpersonal conflict, digitally mediated communication, cancel culture, public shaming, and the discursive struggle over forgiveness in what has increasingly become a highly polarized society. Since 1993, Dr. Blitvich has published eleven books in highly respected academic venues like Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, and John Benjamins. Her earliest monograph, La ira y la cortesía (Anger and Politeness), explores linguistic encoding of social change and politeness in 1960s English theatre. Her more recent books cover topics like intergroup communication, online identity formation, influencer discourse, reality television, the cultural construction of politeness in social-media domains, and digital discourse. Over the past 30 years she has also edited five special journal issues and published 38 peer-reviewed book chapters and 35 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as a textbook, encyclopedia entries, and conference proceedings. She is also founder and co-editor in chief of the Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict (JLAC) and a founding general editor of the Routledge Focus on (Im)politeness Book Series.

The English Department has long known about Dr. Blitvich’s stellar record as a linguistics researcher as well as her tireless commitment to the profession and UNC Charlotte. This distinction is absolutely well deserved.

Congratulations Pilar!!!!