María Martínez Lirola is Professor of the Department of English at the University of Alicante, Spain and Research Fellow at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her main areas of research are Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. She has published extensively in international journals such as Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, Social Semiotics, Visual Communication, Signos, RESLA, etc. She has also published seven books and several books chapters in publishers such as Peter Lang, Cambridge Scholars Publishers, John Benjamins and Comares, among others.

Dr. Martínez Lirola is the director of the research group “Critical Analysis of Multimodal Discourse” from 2010. She has been a visiting scholar in different universities such as: Research Institute on Humanities and Social Sciences Pedro Francisco Bonó (2021), University Jules Verne (2020), Manchester Metropolitan University (2019), University of Rome (2019), Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales en la República Dominicana (FLACSO-RD) (2018), Queens College, City University of New York (USA, 2017), Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla, Colombia, 2016), Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD, 2015), University of Nottingham, Malaysia campus (2015), University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada 2014), Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada, 2012), University of South Africa, UNISA (Pretoria, South Africa, 2012), University of Anahuac Mayad (Mérida, Mexico, 2008), University of Kwazulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, 2006), and Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia, 2005). She has presented papers in international congresses all over the world.